Julius cracked with laughter, made worse by Tubruk’s stunned expression.

“I’ve never seen you so nervous before,” Julius said. “I think you have taken a liking to the little puppy?”

Tubruk shrugged, irritated by the change in mood. Typical of Octavian to ignore his orders yet again. Each day seemed to start afresh for him, with his lessons or punishments completely forgotten.

“He has a hardy spirit for a lad so young. He reminds me of you sometimes, now we’ve cleaned him up a little.”

“I won’t question anything you have done in my absence, Tubruk. If your judgment was good enough for my father, it will always be good enough for me. I’ll see the lad properly when I return this evening or tomorrow. He was a bit small to be fighting on the backstreets of the city, wasn’t he?”

Tubruk nodded, pleased Julius hadn’t objected. He wondered if it was the right moment to mention that the boy had his own room in the house and his own pony in the stables. Probably not.

Still smiling, Julius went into the main buildings, and Tubruk was left alone in the yard. A flicker of movement from the stables registered in his vision and he sighed. The boy was spying again, probably worried that his pony would be taken away, the only threat that had any effect on him.

*                                                      *                                                      *

Julius sat silently in his mother’s dressing room and watched while a slave applied the oils and paints that went some way toward hiding her wasted condition. The fact that she had allowed him to see her without the aids worried him as much as the actual shock of how thin and ill looking she had become. For so long, he had promised himself that he would reveal his understanding of her sickness and achieve a companionship of sorts from the rubble of his childhood. As the moment had come, he couldn’t think how to begin. The woman sitting in front of the mirror was almost a stranger to him. Her cheeks had sunk into darkened hollows that resisted the paints the slave applied, showing through the lighter colors like a shadow of death that hung over her. Her dark eyes were listless and weary and her arms were so pitifully thin it made him wince to look at them.

Aurelia had known him, at least. She had greeted him with tears and a delicate embrace that he returned with infinite care, feeling as if he could break the fragile thing she had become. Even then, she gasped slightly as he held her, and guilt swept over him.

When the slave had packed her materials into an elegantly veneered case and bowed out of the room, Aurelia turned to her son and essayed a smile, though her skin crinkled like parchment under the applications of false colors.