The pontifex led the bull forward to the temple steps. Two more priests murmured prayers, and the bull threw up its nose at the stench. The steps were red-brown and sticky. Sabina looked nervous but she had asked to come—“I want to pray for ’Linus, too”—and he allowed her to hide her face in the folds of his toga as the knife descended. The bull bellowed, going to its knees, and Marcus came forward to bathe his hands in the stream of blood. “Minerva, protect my son,” he said. Confused images of the sturdy four-year-old guiltily confessing he had put a beetle in his mother’s wine cup, the boy bursting with pride in a brand-new Praetorian breastplate, the man writhing agonized under Lepida’s raking nails. “Minerva, goddess of soldiers. A thousand bulls, white or any other color, if you bring my son home safe.” Clasping his scarlet-gloved fingers as the priests chanted and the bull died. “Blood for blood.”

WE’VE done what we can.” Commander Trajan shrugged. “Now we wait.”

Paulinus glanced sideways at his second-in-command: stocky, fit, square-shouldered, some twelve or thirteen years older than Paulinus, wearing his breastplate like a second skin. Trajan commanded the tautest and fiercest of the legionnaires in Lower Germania, and by rights he should have commanded the offensive against Saturninus. But Paulinus’s cousin Governor Lappius had insisted hysterically on appointing Paulinus unofficial commander of both legions, against all rules of military rank, and Paulinus—suddenly sober again after a month of wine and hazy self-recriminations—had not refused. He could not rejoice, not when civil war lay around the corner—but he could not halt the small voice in his head from singing, Commander of two legions! Commander of two legions! Not that Trajan had been happy about it.

“I need you,” Paulinus had said bluntly. “I don’t know this country, I don’t know your soldiers, and I don’t know the terrain. You’ll be my second.”

“Yes, Commander.” Stiffly. “I am happy to serve under you.”

“Bull,” Paulinus had said. “But can I still rely on you?”

Trajan’s forthright eyes surveyed him. “Are you a pansy like your cousin?” he sneered, and they had been friends instantly. Trajan had done much of the work on the town’s hasty defenses, advising Paulinus where the cohorts might best be placed—Paulinus’s main contribution had been to stop Trajan from throttling Lappius, who even now was crouched back in his crude wooden-walled palace and moaning.

They waited now on their horses, side by side, wrapped in heavy cloaks and breathing white into the frigid air. Before them stood the smart ranks of legionnaires, leaning on their shields and chatting among themselves.

“So why are you out in Germania instead of serving your cushy palace berth?” Trajan asked idly. “What’s your poison, Norbanus—women, family, or debts?”

Paulinus hesitated. “Women,” he said. “Family, too, come to think of it.”

“I’ll take a rebellious province and a horde of screaming Germans any day.”

“So would I.” Paulinus flipped a bit of his horse’s mane to the other side of its neck. Somehow, on the brink of battle, Lepida seemed very far away. He couldn’t picture her clearly, not here with the smell of snow and steel and mud in his nose and the chink of shields in his ears. It was a masculine smell; she had no place in it.