My baby came early, screaming like a demon and wringing me out like a wet tunic and my new master could hardly wait to begin my instruction. “You’ll have to study this closely, child—Aristoxenus’s Harmonics. It’s critical that you understand enharmonic microtones—”

“Larcius, really,” Penelope chided. “She only finished pushing a baby out thirty-six hours ago. And that’s a big baby there,” she added, eyeing the puce screaming bundle that was my child.

“Very big,” I’d said feelingly.

“But she doesn’t even understand the difference between the highest note of a parthenios aulos and the lowest of a hyperteleios!” Larcius protested.

“I want to begin my training,” I broke in before Penelope could protest again. “I want to start now.” Arius’s son had come into the world howling the house down, chewing ferociously on his own wrist, his hair already showing in russet-colored spikes along his soft head, and I could hardly look at him without a knot of love and longing and pain rising in my throat. Much easier to think about the notes of a parthenios aulos than about what I could possibly name my new son.

Larcius plunged me into work. He bought me singing lessons and lyre lessons, criticized my technique minutely, taught me the tricks of performing. “Don’t pander to the audience, Thea. Bring them in to you.” How did he know so much? He was a patrician trained in Roman law who had never performed for an audience in his life. “Do admit, though,” he said when I argued. “About music, I’m always right.”

Penelope bathed me in milk to bleach the brown out of my skin, washed my hair in sage and elderflower decoctions to give it gloss, anointed my hands with butter to soften the old calluses. “You’re an artist now,” she said as she taught me the rules of fine dining and elegant conversation. “You’ll need a performance name. Something cool and dignified, I think. Calliope, perhaps, or Erato—the muses of epic verse and poetry . . .”

So I went from Leah of Masada, to Thea of Arius, to a nameless waterfront whore, to Larcius’s newest nightingale—and on the whole, life was good. All Larcius’s musicians wore a little welded copper ring carved with his name, but otherwise his ownership sat lightly on us. So lightly, it was hard to believe five years had gone by. Five years of singing lessons, of practicing with my lyre, of chatting to guests and arguing with Larcius over song interpretations. Five years of musical engagements: intimate suppers demanding hushed love ballads, rowdy faction parties where only cheerful drinking songs would be heard. Five years.

As I’d done every night for the last five years, I finished armoring myself in my gray gown and silver bracelets, collected my lyre, and went to check on my sleeping child before going out. He was just five now, and he had a name, but it wasn’t his father’s. I never, ever thought of his father anymore.

I hear you’ve been paying court to a lute player recently. Or was it a dancer?”