I didn’t touch her. I’d betrayed Mirah once before in the arms of the Empress of Rome. Once was enough.
Sabina’s hand rose through the dark, and I felt her featherlight touch on the one piece of my hair that seemed to stick up no matter how short I razored it off. “Vix,” she said quietly. “How often do you think of Selinus?”
That barren isle where I’d lost Trajan, where Sabina and I had lain together for the last time, her mouth opening under mine like a budding flower. “Every day,” I whispered. Every day I thought of it, because that was how I stopped myself from lashing out at her husband when he needled me. I had your wife, you bastard. How would that hurt your precious pride? I didn’t say it but I thought it, every time he mocked me—only now he’d left off mocking me. Instead he asked my advice and valued what I said and gave me power, and I had to take pride in that.
But I’d still gotten into the habit of remembering how Sabina felt under me, the scent and the taste of her, and that was a bad habit to have. Because I knew exactly how she’d taste if I reached out through the dark and speared her mouth on mine as I’d done on Selinus.
“I think of it.” Her breath touched me, smelling of mint. “Every time I lay eyes on you, Vix.”
“Hell’s gates,” I whispered back. “What did we do on that hillside? What witchcraft did we make?” It was only grief that had pulled us together, so why had that one final time left her lingering in my blood like a poison?
“We did make something on that hillside, but it wasn’t witchcraft.” She took a breath. “Vix—”
ANTINOUS
Antinous could feel the kykeon seeping away. His mind stopped its dreamlike whirl up among the treetops, and his jaw began to hurt from where the Emperor had struck him, yet he felt no urge to move. He sat with his back to the tree and the Emperor of Rome inside the circle of his arms, and he gazed up at the sky. The world was still a place of miraculous beauty. He did not think he would ever see it any other way, ever again.
The Emperor had long ceased weeping, Antinous saw with a huge swell of tenderness. He had thought Hadrian would pull away, but the curly head still lay against his shoulder, and he had not pushed free of Antinous’s encircling arms. Hadrian’s whole terror-tautened body had relaxed to limpness, and he was silent as a tomb. Antinous did not mind. He spoke for the both of them, whatever the mood took him to say.
“My mother talks of her god’s infinite wonders. I wonder what she would say about all this . . . but she’d never come. Her god is too jealous. I think that’s why I can’t believe in him.”
And “Don’t worry for your Empress. My father is with her. He’d protect her against the hordes at Thermopylae if he had to.”
And “I know what I believe in now. This—peace and beauty and stars . . .”
The Emperor sighed, so Antinous knew he was awake. A question had been forming in him. It was time to speak it aloud. “What faces do you see, Caesar?” he asked quietly. “What faces make you so afraid?”
A long silence. Finally the Emperor spoke, his voice husky and cracked. “The faces in my Hades.”
“What is your Hades?”
“Pray you never know.”
Antinous turned his head a little so his cheek rested against the Emperor’s hair, and realized he wanted to press another kiss there. I am happy, Antinous thought wonderingly. I am so happy.
The Emperor’s head turned too, tilting toward him. Antinous saw dark eyes gleaming like pieces of jet. Weary eyes, and lonely. So lonely his soul hurt. Surrounded by crowds, and still so lonely, Antinous thought. He understood that, even though his own loneliness was so different: the child waiting alone for a god in a lion skin to claim him; the boy playing alone among stray dogs because his sisters had their own games and their bond of blood; the student at the paedogogium who sat alone because he had no friends; the lone son who could not speak to his father about so many of the things that troubled him. Antinous was so often alone, in one way or another. Little Annia had seen that when she first laid eyes on him, observant young thing that she was.
You are never alone, he thought, looking at the Emperor of Rome. But you are still as lonely as I am.
Hadrian’s bearded lips brushed his, as tentatively as though he had never offered a kiss in his life. Antinous’s breath caught in his throat, the blood tingling in his veins. He threaded his hands through Hadrian’s curly hair, and he felt the Emperor’s wide strong hand cradling his cheek. Hadrian turned in Antinous’s arms, his hard chest against Antinous’s, and he could feel the thump of the Emperor’s heart. That hunter’s heart, which had probably beat calmly while facing down a maddened she-bear, was thrumming fast as a bird’s wings. Hadrian’s mouth was fierce against his, and Antinous fell into the kiss like he’d fallen into the whirl of kykeon. They sank down into the moss, twined together like vines, and Antinous set his lips at the hollow of Hadrian’s collarbone, kissing him with a tenderness that rose fierce and protective in his own throat. Who felt protective of an emperor, the lord of the world ringed by spears and safe from all danger? But Antinous felt it anyway, and he wrapped Hadrian in his arms and held him, murmured to him, opened to him under the welcoming moon.
VIX
Sabina was about to tell me something, but I laid my hand on her bare ankle and she went silent. Slowly I slid my hand along the curve of her leg, the rough hem of her robe pooling over my wrist as it pushed up. “What were you about to say?” I asked, and my voice was hoarse in my own ears.
She was silent. Her flesh was warm and smooth, and I could feel her breath coming uneven. My fingers found the saffron ribbon she’d tied about her leg above the knee, the mark of an acolyte like the matching ribbon at her wrist. I ran my fingertips along the taut band for a moment, and then I slid one finger beneath and slowly tugged it loose. I twined the bit of silk between my fingers, and it was still warm from her skin. “Hell’s gates,” I whispered. “Don’t tell me this isn’t witchcraft you’re working on me.”
She said nothing. I saw her biting her lip in the dark, and I remembered how cool and fresh those lips tasted, like water from the world’s purest spring. I gripped the loops of the ribbon in my fist, so hard they bit into my fingers.
Sabina lifted her hand, plucking the other saffron ribbon away from her wrist. She slid it about my neck, her fingers whispering over my skin, holding each end in a small hand as she tugged me down toward her on the moss. Tugged me toward her with nothing more than a frail strip of silk, and the whole slim coil of her body arched up toward me and her lips were just a hair’s distance from mine when I moved over her. I loosed my fist from the other ribbon’s loops and laid the band of silk across her throat, stretching it between my fists and pressing her back into the ground. Then I eased up until she was at arm’s length again, my fists sunk into the moss on either side of her head, the ribbon stretching taut between them across her supple throat.
“No,” I said thickly. “No.”
She still had me around the neck with her own length of silk. She could have tugged the ends again, brought me down full length against her, and she had to feel how hard I wanted it. All she had to do was tug, and I was trying to summon Mirah’s face to mind, keep myself from following that tug like a dog. They called me the Emperor’s dog, but really I was his wife’s. God help me.
Sabina let the ribbon slide away down my neck. “No,” she said, and I didn’t need to see her face to know she wore one of her wry smiles. “So much no.”
I released her. Stood up. She rose too, her bare arms gleaming like silver in the faint starlight. “You’ll be cold,” I said, and slid the lion skin from my shoulders so I could drape it about hers. Her small shoulders were wrapped for a moment inside the circle of my arms, and I lowered my head so I could press my lips briefly against the crown of her shorn head. “I’ve always loved that short hair.”
“Why do you think I keep it this way?”
It was nearly dawn as we made our silent way back to the temple. We had almost cleared the trees when I saw the honey-colored head of my son. He was sitting against a tree of his own, eyes closed either in sleep or in reverie, and I saw a darker head resting in his lap like a child’s.
Antinous opened his eyes and saw me, just as I saw that it was Hadrian who slept with his head in my son’s lap. The Emperor looked white and worn and innocent somehow, like a terrified child at last relaxed into slumber. “He was frightened,” Antinous said simply. “Something he saw under the kykeon.”
“Did it affect you as badly as it did him?” I asked, because it had been a night for dreams but also for nightmares—and I loved my son so much, I’d have slain every night terror in all the cups of kykeon in the world, just to keep his sleep serene.
Antinous smiled at me, and his smile was a dazzling thing, sweet and dazed and utterly beautiful. “I have dreamed and danced and marveled. And now I have wakened, and found the world is still a wondrous place.”
He’s still drunk, I decided.
“Thank you for looking after the Emperor,” said Sabina, and the three of us raised the Emperor of Rome in his slumber. The hierophant was ringing his gong, and all around people stumbled to answer the call, wild-eyed and dazed. Persephone had been found; death defeated once again. There were only minor rites left over the next few days, and then the final trudge back to Athens.
The Mysteries of Eleusis were over.
CHAPTER 7
ANTINOUS
Athens
Two days after the Mysteries ended, the Emperor summoned him.
Antinous had always found waiting an agony—waiting for his father to return from his latest war; waiting for Mirah to conceive that son who would have healed the little wound in her heart. Waiting usually meant time for doubt to grow, time for Antinous to convince himself that this was the war his father would never return from; that Mirah never would birth that son and would be giving Antinous that mournful, half-resentful smile for the rest of his life. But there were no doubts this time. Antinous knew the Emperor would summon him, and he waited those two days serene as a lotus floating on a pool.
It wasn’t lotuses he smelled now, but lemons—the delicate waft of lemon trees all around, as Antinous made his way through the grove where he had been told Hadrian waited. “I could delay a bit,” the Praetorian who had summoned him ventured. It was massive, square-built, red-faced Boil, who had been like an uncle to Antinous as long as he could remember. “I don’t like it, Caesar summoning you without Vix. I could say I couldn’t find you, wait till your father gets back from inspecting that cohort outside Athens—”
“That’s all right.”
“But—”
“Please?” Antinous said simply.
Boil sighed and let him go ahead into the lemon trees.
The Emperor sat on a marble bench reading from a wax tablet, staff propped beside him and three dogs panting happily about his feet. He did not look up as Antinous came to stand before him.
Boil’s footsteps retreated from the edge of the trees, leaving them entirely alone, and still Hadrian continued to read. Antinous’s black dog had put his hackles up at the Emperor’s hounds; Antinous bent and ran a hand over the pricked ears. “Hush, Caesar.”
Hadrian’s head jerked up, startled out of his deliberate silence. “I beg your pardon?”
“The dog,” Antinous explained. “His name is Caesar.”
“That is very nearly blasphemous.”
“My father named him. He said he’d like to be giving a Caesar the orders for once.”
A sharp glance. “Your father is rude.”
“He is,” Antinous agreed. Hadrian’s eyes were cold. The same eyes Antinous had seen when he first struck the Emperor. Cold enough to pierce Antinous’s serenity, but not shatter it. I do fear you, he thought. I’m not stupid, after all. No matter what had happened between them during the Mysteries, this man was dangerous. How could the Emperor of Rome not be? But he was also the man who had pressed a tender kiss between Antinous’s shoulder blades and murmured sweet, broken words in the dark.
From that moment, Antinous knew the Emperor would call for him again. Because there is more to you than this cold and frightening face and you let me see it.
He returned that intimidating stare with a smile, and Hadrian’s eyes slid away. He tapped his stylus, and Antinous continued to look at him steadily, still smiling.
“Your name,” Hadrian said at last, brusque. “I have forgotten it.”
No, you haven’t. This Emperor was famous for remembering the names of everyone he ever met, lowborn or high. “Antinous,” he replied gently.
“That’s right.” Hadrian made a mark on the wax tablet. Very much the master of the world today in his purple cloak, eyes hooded and aloof, hair gleaming in the dappled sunlight, his broad arms decked with gold bracelets. Confident and haughty; a man who looked like his own statues; not the same man who had ever wept in terror under a night sky. And yet he was. Antinous thought he could still feel the vibration of the Emperor’s heart against his own, as though they lay chest to chest instead of separated by a few feet of lemon-scented breeze.
“You made pleasant company in Eleusis.” The deep voice was careless. “You shall be appropriately rewarded.”
He tossed a purse at Antinous. A good few sesterces, Antinous judged from the weight. He let the purse fall through his fingers to the grass.
Hadrian glanced up from his tablet again. “You wish for more, boy? I do not overpay my whores.”
He said the word whores so sharply. It should have cut like a knife, but it did not. Because you don’t mean it, Antinous thought, I know you don’t. He wished he could stretch out a hand to the master of the world, but he knew he’d be rebuffed. “I want nothing from you, Caesar,” Antinous said, and reached out to the hunting dogs instead. “Nothing except your company.”
“I prefer variety in my bedmates.” Another mark on the wax tablet. “I already had you once. That was enough.”
Antinous almost laughed. Since the day he first started lengthening from a boy to a man—and even before that, truth be told—he’d seen his own face reflected in the gaze of men and women alike and recognized the answering flare for what it was. If there was anything Antinous had learned growing up, it was when he was desired. No one had ever wanted him just once. “Forgive me for contradicting you, Caesar, but you do want me again.”
The Emperor’s eyes narrowed. “You think that pretty face gives you leave to say whatever you please to your Emperor? Or that I cannot find another dozen boys just as handsome as you?”
“It wasn’t my face that drew you in Eleusis, Caesar,” Antinous said. “And it wasn’t your purple cloak that drew me.” What a rare thing that was, for either of them—because if there was anything Hadrian knew, surely it was the flare he saw in the faces of those who looked at him. For Antinous that flare was lust and for the Emperor it was ambition, but it was still the same kind of greed. Something they had in common, Antinous and the Emperor.
“What an innocent you are.” Hadrian did not make it sound like a compliment. “I knew exactly who you were in Eleusis, boy. I knew you were your father’s son Why do you think I bedded you? To insult him.”
“Ouch,” Antinous said, reflective. “That would hurt, Caesar. Except . . .”
“Except for what?”
“You said you didn’t remember my name.”
Silence stretched. Hadrian’s three dogs were pushing for Antinous’s pats, wagging their tails. His own small Caesar growled, and Antinous hushed him. The Caesar on the marble bench sat still as stone.
“Take your gold or not,” he said at last. “You are dismissed.”
Antinous straightened. “You know where to find me, when you are lonely again.”
“I am never lonely,” Hadrian snapped.
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“Forgive me, but you are.” Antinous wanted to curve his hand around that bearded cheek, but the Emperor would probably strike him if he tried. Poor chained dog of a man, snapping at any hand outstretched in comfort. “You are so lonely you could die, Caesar. So am I, sometimes. But not at Eleusis, and not here. Not with you.”
Such a strange mix of feelings surged through him in place of that bleak loneliness. Tenderness: the urge to press a kiss between those scowling eyes. Protectiveness: the desire to massage the tension from those knotted shoulders. A dash of fear, looking at those iron-hammer fists and knowing how much they wanted to lash out.
And passion—sweet gods, passion to buckle the knees. Nothing Antinous had ever felt before: not with the giggling buxom girls of Rome, not with the lean boys of the paedogogium. Antinous looked at the Emperor through the dappled light of the lemon trees, and all he wanted was for those great fists to uncurl and tangle through his hair again—for that bearded mouth to claim his own.
“You are dismissed,” the Emperor said again, at last. “Take your gold and go.”
“I’m no whore,” Antinous said softly. “And you want me to stay.” He had never been so certain of anything in his life.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” The Emperor rose, wincing as he put his weight to his half-healed leg.