“That you did.” He turned and walked backward, appraising me. “Praetorian Prefect, eh?”

I shrugged. “It’s a pisser of a job.”

“It’s still high for a boy like you to climb.” There was pride in his voice, but a certain wry sharpness too. “Son of a gladiator and a slave. I killed Romans, and now you serve them.”

“I order them around! In fact, I’d have had a legion of my own to command if not for the Emperor.”

“And that’s an improvement? Romans made me fight, and now you’re fighting for them?” But his grin had more pride in it this time. “Legionary commander; how did you manage that?”

“The Tenth Fidelis was supposed to be mine.” My old legion. Emperor Trajan had promised it to me at the end of the Parthian wars, said he’d find me a spineless legate with the right bloodlines who would look official if I’d just do the real work and step on a Chatti rebellion for him. I’d gotten drunk in celebration, and had a victorious X tattooed on my shoulder, for “Tenth.” Then Trajan’s collapse in Selinus, and then Hadrian, and you know the whole blasted rest of that. I told my father, briefly.

“Hadrian’s a bastard,” I concluded.

“Most emperors are.” My father ducked around a sapling without looking.

“You’d have liked Trajan.” I had loved him dearly, that grizzled, grinning, swearing giant of a man—I’d wept like a baby at his death, and not because I was losing my legion. I’d wept for him, for the best man I’d ever known outside my father and maybe Titus Aurelius. “Even you would have liked Trajan.”

My father gave a slanted smile at that, but didn’t contradict me.

“Emperor Hadrian, though . . . ” I hesitated. “He’s different. He’s my enemy.”

“You’ve had emperors for enemies before.”

“Not like this.”

We’d reached the top of the hill, coming out from the flowering trees. There was half a crumbling stone wall at the top, marking the border of the land, perhaps. The view behind it was more thick trees, more hills, the glitter of water somewhere from a stream, but my father turned his back on the view, leaning against the wall, his dogs settling themselves panting about his feet, and he folded his broad arms across his chest and looked at me. “Tell me then.”