“You know, I am beginning to regret taking you along.” I glared. “Women don’t belong on long journeys.”

“The Emperor doesn’t agree. Not if he’s bringing Empress Sabina this time.”

“Never mind her.”

“Why do you get twitchy whenever you hear her name?”

I suppressed the urge to twitch. “Maybe I should send you and the girls back to Rome if you’re going to be this meddling!”

Mirah smiled at me. “Vix? Go see your mother and father.”

It was a gray, blustery morning when I turned off the muddy road and slid down from my horse. I knew this road. It hadn’t changed much since I’d gone charging down it at eighteen, all afire with dreams of glory. I hadn’t owned a horse then; I hadn’t owned anything except my pack of clothes and the amulet of Mars which was the very first of my good-luck tokens. Now that I was going back up the muddy slope, a man grown with more baggage visible and invisible than a pack of clothes, I wanted to be on foot again. Mirah slid down from the saddle where she’d ridden behind me, winding her fingers through mine, but the girls squealed at the mud and so they stayed on their mule. “That’s girls for you,” Antinous groaned, but he led their mule along behind me good-naturedly enough, his long legs swinging through the mud.

I saw the crowning roof of a snug little villa. Stone, not wood; better built than most of the huts in this windswept place. Wooden buildings behind—cow byres; those were new. Things were prosperous, then, since I’d left. I swallowed, and felt the quick pressure of Mirah’s fingers. Rich grass ran up the slope toward the house on either side of the road, grass thick and soft with dew, and hedges flowered against the villa’s walls. My feet took me unthinkingly around the east wall to where the morning sun came strongest, where I remembered there had been a meager excuse for a garden.

There still was one. Someone had put in a fruit tree of some sort, but it looked pinched and leafless, and the herbs in their pots weren’t much more than a collection of twigs. I smiled at that. He still wasn’t any good at gardening, then, the broad-shouldered man in a blue tunic who squatted among the herbs with a spade and a trowel.

My feet were soundless on the grass, but the man whipped about before I got a step farther, one gnarled hand dropping his trowel and drawing the dagger at his waist instead. He was up in a crouch and ready to face me in an eyeblink, and his shoulders were bent and his hair entirely gray, but that crisp secutor stance could have graced any arena in Rome. And had.