Emperor Nerva took his throne.

Priests came forward, leading rose-garlanded sacrificial bulls. Vestal Virgins in a silent white line. Senators in their formal purple-banded togas. Marcus claimed his place among them, bowing very deeply. He stepped back, joined by Sabina, who looked so tall and pretty in her first woman’s gown that he realized she’d soon be grown up. He’d have her for a few years though, before she married. Marcus wondered if he should ever tell his daughter how close he had come to being Emperor, to making her an Empress by marrying her to the cheerful Trajan . . . Perhaps not.

Calpurnia joined them, glowing like a spring daffodil in a yellow gown. Marcus brought her hand up, pressing it against his cheek, and knew people were murmuring. He had not married Calpurnia yet, not until the end of September when the augurs had declared the date most auspicious, but she had already moved quite openly into the Norbanus household with all her slaves and belongings. Her family wailed and Rome whispered, but his betrothed was impervious. “I adore you, Marcus,” she said frankly. “I’m not wasting one more day away from you.” Marcus found it rather entertaining, at his age, to be scandalous. Only one person’s opinion mattered, and she had given her consent immediately.

“I like to see you happy,” Sabina had said, looking up from a map she had spread out on his library table. “Not that you’re exactly happy right now, but you will be. Calpurnia will see to it. And she’ll have lots more children, which is good because I plan on seeing the world, not marrying a senator and being a dull Roman matron. So there should be someone besides me to carry on the family name.”

She saw his face then and tucked her narrow brown head against his shoulder. “’Linus wouldn’t grudge it,” she said gently. “He’d want you to be happy, too.”

“And your mother?” Marcus managed to speak around the terrible block in his throat that rose whenever Paulinus came to his thoughts. He couldn’t talk about Paulinus, not yet—even to Sabina.

“Well, Mother wouldn’t have wanted you to be happy,” Sabina admitted. “But that doesn’t matter now.” Lady Lepida Pollia had been found dead in the Domus Augustana, stuffed ignominiously into a closet . . . another victim, all assumed, of the assassin who had claimed the Emperor’s life. Marcus, who knew better, did not inquire into the death of his former wife. In the pain of losing Paulinus, he did not even care.

Rome’s former Empress made her solitary way up to Emperor Nerva and sank into a magnificent curtsy. She’d been true to her word, seeing that Paulinus was given a hero’s funeral as the man who had died trying to protect his Emperor and friend. An arch was to be constructed in Paulinus’s honor, his name known forever. The Empress had already bullied it through the Senate in her last act as Empress before she announced her retirement to Baiae and her own family. She curtsied now before the new Emperor in her white silk, a woman for Roman matrons everywhere to hold before their daughters as a model of virtue and decency. Marcus remembered the Empress back when she had been a brown-haired girl named Marcella, a girl with a talent for scheming whom he had not liked. He liked her well enough now, but would he hold her up as a role model for Sabina? Perhaps not . . .