Julius’s searching gaze found Brutus in the second row of three, sitting next to a woman who raised her head to look back at him. There was something disturbing in her cool appraisal, and he wondered how she seemed to stand out against the crowd around her, as if she were sitting fractionally closer than anyone else. In a timeless moment, she leaned back slowly, arresting his attention. Her hair was unbound, and before he summoned the will to break the contact, she raised a hand to pull a tendril back from where it had fallen loose over her face.

Forcing himself to relax and concentrate, he breathed in the warm air, going over the points he had prepared with his jurists in the weeks after the formal summons. If the case was judged fairly, he knew they had an excellent chance of winning, but if any of the three magistrates was in the pay of his enemies, the trial could be a mockery, with everything won but the final verdict. His gaze swept over the gathering crowd, all of them oblivious to what was at stake. They had come for the entertainment of oratory, to cheer or curse clever points of debate. Julius hoped too that some had come because of the rumors his jurists had started around the city, that the trial was to be nothing less than a defense of Marius. There did seem to be a lot of the plebeians in attendance, and the sellers of baked fish and steaming bread were doing a fine trade already as the people waited patiently for the magistrates and the praetor to make their entrance.

Julius looked again at the draped shields that Alexandria had completed, and noticed that many of the crowd craned their necks for a glimpse of them as well, pointing and talking amongst themselves. Only Alexandria, Tabbic, and himself knew what was under the thick folds of cloth, and Julius felt a touch of excitement at the response they would get when he unveiled them at last.

Behind him, his three jurists shuffled through their papers and notes one more time, their heads bowed in low mutters. Hiring Quintus Scaevola to help him prepare the case had cost him two talents of gold, but there were few men in Rome with a better command of the twin laws of custom and the Twelve Tables. It had taken such a vast fee just to tempt him out of retirement, but despite his arthritic stiffness, the brain behind the heavy-lidded eyes had turned out to be as sharp as Julius had been told. Julius watched Quintus as he scribbled a footnote to the papers for the trial and caught his eye as he looked upward in thought.

“Nervous?” Quintus asked, waving the sheaf at the court and the shadowed crowds beyond.

“A little,” Julius admitted. “There is a great deal at stake.”

“Remember the point of value. You always leave that one out.”