“He won’t.” Coolly. “I’ll have the boy out of the city before dawn.”

“The Vestal,” said Paulinus. “She was—she wasn’t a Vestal—Julia, Lady Julia who was dead—”

“No time for that now.” Marcus didn’t seem surprised. Paulinus stared.

“You knew?”

“You think she faked her own death without help? Get back to the palace, boy, before you’re missed.”

Paulinus’s feet took him past the circular Temple of Vesta first. Looking up, he saw the other Vestal Virgins watching; a silent white line. Their faces were all veiled.

He bunched Julia’s bloody veil up and laid it on the first step. His knees gave out, and he sat there beside it until a pair of Praetorians came in search of him.

THE old year had died—and by the Emperor’s decree, Rome would see the new year in with a death.

It was a strange, resentful crowd that gathered to watch Lady Flavia go into exile and the Vestal into death. The Emperor pronounced it a day of celebration, but the banners looked limp and the flowers fell like tears and the trumpets could have been dirges. Bad luck, people whispered, bad luck. A priestess and a princess both doomed before the year was a day old—the coming year would surely bring nothing good.

Paulinus, escorting the prisoners on his black horse, felt haggard.

A rustle greeted the two condemned women, walking in a cluster of Praetorians to their fates. Both small and fair-haired, one in stained coral-colored silk; the other in a pristine Vestal’s robe. A ship awaited Lady Flavia, and then a small sea island; but all that awaited the Vestal Justina was an airless bricked-up chamber.

Vestal Virgins who broke their vows were buried alive.

Arm in arm the two women passed through the street. “Why?” Paulinus heard Flavia say dully. “Leaving me alive on an island for the next forty years—why is that kinder than dying?”

“Who said the gods were kind?” Julia’s voice was gentle.

“Oh, I know they aren’t kind. Your goddess or my God. My boys are dead, Julia. My eldest with Flavius, my youngest—I won’t even know when he’s executed—”

“I wouldn’t give up on him yet, Flavia.”

“No. I know Domitian. He hates children because they remind him he’s mortal—he beat his own children out of his wife before they were even born, and he’ll kill mine, too—”

“Watch the horizon.”

“W-what?”

“When you get to Pandateria. It’s a silent place—sea grass waving in the wind, and quiet stretches of sand, and a little stone hut with a small shrine. You’ll be alone, and the silence will be unbearable for a while, so listen to the sea birds cry and watch the horizon. You won’t be alone for long.”

Her voice was low and lulling. “One day soon you’ll see a sail on the edge of the ocean. A faded red sail, I think, and a bank of oars flashing each side of it. You’ll think of assassins and you’ll want to run, but you’ll stand proudly because you’re a Flavian and you’ll want to die like one. But the galley won’t land. It will lower a tiny fishing boat, without oars, and the tide will carry it to shore, and long before it lands you’ll see who sits in that boat waving his arms and calling for you. And you’ll plunge into the ocean, and you’ll reclaim your son.”