11. Each of the three narrators has a relic or a symbol of power that defines them: Carmelina has a true relic in the withered hand of her patron saint Santa Marta; Giulia has her floor-length hair; Leonello has his knives. What power do these relics really hold for their owners? How do they feel about their respective relics by the end of the novel?

12. All the Borgias change radically over the course of the novel. Did you find their descent believable? Who do you think changed the most radically, and why? What do you think the future holds for them, beyond the end of the novel?

Special Excerpt from LADY OF THE ETERNAL CITY

PRESENTING A SPECIAL EXCERPT OF KATE QUINN’S

LADY of the ETERNAL CITY

An Empress of Rome Novel

AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2014 FROM BERKLEY BOOKS

Vindolanda. Home—or was it? I hadn’t set foot in northern Britannia since I was eighteen, after all, when I’d left my family for golden dreams of glory in Rome. Was Vindolanda my home just because my parents had settled there in their happy exile? Or was Rome my home because it was the place I’d chosen for myself?

“Who would settle any place so cold and misty?” Mirah shivered in the red wool cloak that brought out the brightness in her cheeks and kept off the summer rains that greeted our arrival. “It’s summer, and it feels like autumn!”

“My parents are utterly mad, that’s why they settled here.”

“And you haven’t seen them since you were eighteen.” Mirah poked my side, hunting for the gap between my breastplate and backplate where she could tickle me. “You’re nervous, aren’t you?”

“I charged a Parthian army at Ctesiphon. You think I’m nervous to see my own mother and father?”

She gave me one of those looks of wifely amusement again. Maybe I was nervous, just a little. Would I find them unbearably changed? Worse yet, would they find me unbearably changed? Maybe they wouldn’t like what they saw. I didn’t altogether like what I saw in the mirror anymore, after all. Why should they?

So when I first arrived in Vindolanda, I didn’t go to my old home. I dawdled. I had to survey the troops who kept order in these bleak windswept moors. Then there was the praetorium, which I had to see enlarged into a place where the Emperor could house his entourage once he arrived, a place with proper shuttered windows, plastered and painted walls, a tiled floor. “I have to make special preparations,” I insisted when Mirah raised her eyebrows. “If Hadrian’s bringing Empress Sabina, I’ve got to see the praetorium made fit for an emperor’s wife.”

“Who, according to you, is quite accustomed to odd adventures, and probably wouldn’t care if her floor was tiled or not,” Mirah said. “You’re stalling, Vix.”