Without warning, she raised her hand to touch the white scar that crossed his forehead. “Let me look at you,” she said, standing closer and whistling softly. “You’re lucky to be alive. Is that why your eye is different?”

He shrugged, ready to turn the conversation away. Then the story spilled out of him, the fight on Accipiter, the head wound that took months to heal, the fits that remained with him.

“Nothing is the same since I left,” he said. “Or everything is and I have changed too much to see it. Cabera says the fits could be with me for the rest of my life, or stop tomorrow. There is no way of telling.” He held up his left hand and squinted at it, but it was steady.

“I sometimes think life is nothing more than pain with moments of joy,” she replied. “You are stronger than before, Julius, even with the wound. I’ve found the trick is to wait through the pain and take the moments of happiness without worrying about the future.”

He dropped his hand, suddenly ashamed that he had talked so intimately of his fears. It was not a burden for her, or anyone except himself. He was the head of a family, a tribune of Rome, and the general of Primigenia. Strange how he couldn’t muster the sort of pleasure he knew such a dream would once have given him.

“Have you . . . seen Brutus?” Julius asked after a pause. She turned away and busied her hands with clearing up the tools on Tabbic’s workbench.

“We are seeing each other,” she said.

“Oh. I haven’t told him we . . . um . . .”

Alexandria laughed suddenly, looking at him over her shoulder. “You’d better not. There’s enough competition between you two without putting me in the middle.”

To his astonishment, Julius recognized a spike of jealousy enter his thoughts. He struggled with it. She was not his and, except for a frozen perfect moment years before, never had been. She didn’t seem to sense the private whirl of his memories as he looked at her.

“Keep him close to you, Julius. Rome is more dangerous than you know,” she said.

Julius almost grinned at the thought of what he had survived just to return to it, but the fact that his life mattered to her at all sobered him.

“I’ll keep him close,” he said.

*                                                      *                                                      *