“It’s hot today.”

“Hot?”

“Oh—maybe not. In Judaea it must get much—”

“No—no, it’s hot.”

Every week I came with another of Lepida’s misspelled notes. Read them aloud. Then waited for the diffident word that always came.

“Cut yourself?” Indicating, one day, my neatly bandaged wrist.

“Yes,” I said evenly, turning my hands over to hide my scars.

Too late.

“Your wrists look like my back,” he observed, and looked at me. Just eyes, gray eyes, and they weren’t as cold as people said they were.

There was an old woman among the Pollio slaves, a Brigantian woman who did the laundry. I wheedled a song out of her, a song from Britannia. It was a lovely thing that haunted the ear, and the strange words were cool and slippery in my mouth. “A song about home,” the old woman said. “Like all songs from slaves.” The next night at the Golden Cockerel, at the dawn hour when the drunks were nodding and Arius drinking grimly in his corner, I sang the Brigantian song about home. Sang it low and soft so the melody slipped coolly through the torpid room, sang it so a damp island breeze freshened the congealed air, sang it to the top of Arius’s head as he stared down into his wine. He never looked up, but—

“Where did you learn that?” he asked me the next time I came with one of Lepida’s notes.

I shrugged. “From a slave.”

He said no more, but I was starting to know the planes and shadows of his face, the flickers of expression that crossed his eyes . . . and I was well pleased.

THE heat was making him crazy. The boredom, the inactivity, but mostly the lazy shimmering heat. He dreaded the arena, woke up swearing when he thought of the applause on his head, but the thought of the approaching games was getting better. Anything was better than feeling his own blood boil inside his veins.

He prowled out into the courtyard, where the midday sun made mirage pools on the packed sand, and got a wooden practice sword. He stripped off his tunic and drilled—relentless mechanical drills that satisfied his body if not his temper. The trainer paired him with a Greek for a practice bout, and Arius didn’t wait for the Greek’s salute before bringing his sword down in a vicious side sweep.

“Lay off!” The Greek jumped out of the way. “It’s just training!”

Kill him, whispered the demon in Arius’s head.

He launched forward. The Greek brought up his own blade, and wood met wood with a flat crack. The Greek’s sword broke off at the hilt in a spray of splinters. He leaped back and Arius leaped with him, smashing his sword hilt into the Greek’s nose. The Greek toppled, and they rolled in a flaying tangle across the courtyard. Arius got his hands around a sweating throat, gritty with sand—

Kill him. Kill him.

“That’s enough, dear boy.”

He blinked.