“I may still have to kill him.” Vix’s eyes were like pits. “Tomorrow. Next year. Who knows? Your husband made me into his killer, and God knows he loves to kill things. I wonder how long he’ll stare into this sack here, when I lay it at his feet.”
Sabina met his gaze. “I’m sorry it had to be you.”
“I don’t want your pity.”
“We used to be friends—”
“I can’t afford friends. And you spent the last year ignoring me.”
A secret could be a heavy thing; Sabina had discovered that during the past year. It could hang in the pit of the stomach like a burning stone. “You have no idea why—”
He pushed past her, his armored shoulder brushing her bare arm. His footsteps went on without slowing in the direction the Emperor had taken. Sabina closed her eyes a moment, summoning a face like marble. She wanted a basin to vomit into, a pillow to rage into, a shoulder to cry into, and she would have none of those things. Because an Empress was never alone.
All hail the Empress, she thought savagely. Vibia Sabina, Empress of the seven hills, mistress of Rome, lady of the Eternal City.
CHAPTER 2
ANNIA
A.D. 122, Spring
Rome
Annia Galeria Faustina never meant to cause trouble. Trouble just happened.
“I won’t do it again,” she promised every time she did something wrong, and meant it. She tried to follow the rules. It wasn’t her fault she kept finding cracks between them.
“Just be gentler,” the housekeeper scolded. “Girls should be gentle!”
“Gentle is boring.” Annia liked to play hard, and guests took her for a boy sometimes, approving of her scabbed knees and the ferocious scowl she wore when she sent the trigon ball flying clear up to the roof of the villa. “That boy will conquer us a new province someday,” the guests would chuckle, and then they were embarrassed when Annia’s mother said with amusement, “She’s a girl.” After that, they somehow didn’t approve anymore.
“That child should be inside sewing, not climbing on roofs!” Annia had heard two old ladies whisper, appalled because she’d gone climbing after the trigon ball and then fallen off the terra-cotta roof. But she didn’t cry. Annia never cried. Her father had told her the story of the Spartan boy, the one who let a fox chew his vitals open rather than cry and give his position away to his enemies. Annia tried letting one of the meaner vineyard dogs chew on her foot, biting hard on a stick first so she could match the Spartan boy for stoicism. But the dog wouldn’t chew hard enough to get any real blood flowing, and then the nursemaid came and made all kinds of silly fuss.
“You’re going to get in trouble one of these days,” Annia’s mother sighed.
“I’m always in trouble,” Annia complained, because how was she supposed to know she shouldn’t let dogs chew her toes off unless somebody told her?
“No, real trouble, my love. Because you’re not afraid of anything, and that’s tempting the Fates.”
Annia shrugged. She had long decided, when her father told her the story of the Three Fates, that they had it in for her. And this morning her mother wanted to take her to the Domus Flavia, where everything was breakable and the whole world was watching. That was tempting the Fates. “Don’t make me go!”
“Well, we all leave for Britannia soon. I’ll be back soon enough, but this could be your aunt’s last chance to see you all year.”
“I just saw her at the old Empress’s funeral.” The woman her mother had always called Old Stoneface Plotina had gone up in smoke on her funeral pyre not two days ago, and that had been quite enough standing still and being good to last Annia all year. “Aunt Sabina doesn’t like me, anyway.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?” Annia felt her mother’s hands tying off the end of her plait. “Of course she likes you.”
“No, she doesn’t,” Annia said with deep conviction. And the shuttered look on Aunt Sabina’s face as Annia trailed into the Imperial gardens in her mother’s wake was almost vindicating. Told you, Annia thought, meeting those inscrutable eyes.
“You shouldn’t have brought her, Faustina. She’ll end up packed in a box.” The Empress waved a hand toward her quarters, where a stream of slaves bustled. “My maids are trying to pack the entire palace.”
“They need me to supervise,” Annia’s mother decided. “I am packed already.”
“I’m sure you are. Are you certain you want to come all the way to Britannia?” The Empress patted the stone bench beside her. “Sea travel, in your condition—”
“Nonsense, I’ve never felt better.” Annia’s mother gave her rising stomach a proud thump. “It’s good breeding stock I come from! My mother never had a moment’s trouble, and neither will I.”
The Empress still looked anxious. She was fingering something in her black silk lap; Annia craned her neck to see what. Something dirty-looking. “I am sorry, you know,” the Empress went on. “Titus hates travel, and I really have no idea why Hadrian insisted he escort me. I’m perfectly capable of crossing to Britannia myself.”
Annia didn’t really remember the Emperor—he’d left last year on a grand tour of Germania and Gaul. She knew, however, that the Emperor didn’t like her father, which was very strange. Everybody liked her father.
“Can I come to Britannia?” she blurted out.
Her mother laughed. “You’d challenge a Druid to single combat, and then he’d cook you over a fire!”
“I’m not afraid of any old Druid,” Annia said scornfully.
“What a fearless girl you are,” Empress Sabina commented, which was really just a way of saying, No, I don’t like you and I don’t want you coming along to Britannia or anywhere else.
“Run and play for a moment,” her mother said, and Annia went up the garden path around a statue of a satyr. But she doubled back through the myrtle bushes, behind the bench where her mother and her aunt sat. Whenever her mother told her to go play, that meant that interesting things were about to get said.
And sure enough: “All right, Vibia Sabina. What’s that dirty thing you’re clutching?”
A rustle as Aunt Sabina passed something over—a folded-over tablet made of lead or something else dark and heavy.
Annia’s mother took it with a groan. “Sabina, really. You made a curse tablet?”
“Five years ago. Feel free to call me foolish.”
“Who did you curse? Let me see . . . ah. ‘To the goddesses Diana, Hecate, and Proserpina. I invoke you holy ones by your names to punish Empress Pompeia Plotina—’ Well, you couldn’t pick a nastier old cow to curse, may the gods keep her rotten soul, but I’ve never taken you for superstitious!”
“Yes, well, I was in a state. She spent fifteen years calling me a whore—she made Hadrian Emperor—she turned him against Titus and got him stuck in that cell—”
“It was all I could do to keep a suitably sad expression at her funeral pyre,” Annia’s mother admitted. “I wanted to dance round the flames singing!”
“So did I.” Aunt Sabina didn’t sound like she wanted to sing and dance, though. She sounded thoughtful. “When I first returned to Rome as Empress, Hadrian was still off in the east—I didn’t have anyone to share the palace with but Plotina, smirking and giving me orders. And I remembered a rather nice old witch in Pannonia when I was traveling years before, who told me all about curses and how to make them . . .”
“I’d say your witch knew her work.” Annia’s mother continued reading off the tablet. “‘May the Empress die alone, neglected, bitter, and without power.’”
“Strange, really,” Aunt Sabina mused. “She spent her whole life working toward one thing: getting Hadrian made Emperor. And once she achieved it, she was finished. Hadrian tossed her aside like an old shoe. Frustration and bitterness and getting exactly what she wanted—that was what killed her.”
“Now
you’re being fanciful. What killed her was a burst heart!”
“I’m not sorry she’s gone.” Aunt Sabina’s voice hardened. “But it’s still strange . . . I spent a good many years wishing her dead. Now that she is, I think it will make very little difference. I’m still Empress, after all. And like her, I’ll die alone, neglected, bitter, and powerless.”
“You,” Annia’s mother said briskly, “are not just being fanciful, but morbid.”
“I am being realistic. The Emperor only summons me to Britannia because he’s discovered there are ceremonial duties I can discharge. The kind of staid public appearances that bore him. And I have to obey.” A shake of Aunt Sabina’s sleek head. “That’s not power of any kind, Faustina.”
“Then what is it?”
“Duty. Empresses live by it. I married a madman, and the Fates put him on the throne—that was a terrible thing. Now I’m to go to Britannia and preside over the dedication of temples and the drone of dinner parties, and that’s merely dull—but I can’t escape either duty.”
Annia decided she didn’t like duty. When she grew up she just wasn’t going to do it.
“Looking the brighter side of things,” Annia’s mother said at last, “now that the old cow is dead, you won’t have anyone calling you a whore across your dinner table.”
The Empress laughed, and Annia tried to wriggle closer. All this talk about curses and hearts bursting was fascinating. But she bumped against a stone nymph, and before she could make a grab, over it went and the carved hand broke off.
“Annia Galeria Faustina!” her mother called. “Stop eavesdropping!”
“Sorry.” Annia winced, crawling out of the bushes. “I didn’t mean to break it—”
“I’m glad you did,” the Empress said. “I’ve always hated that nymph. She has the most sickly expression.”
Annia’s mother laughed, rising. “You two say your good-byes. I’m going to go take charge of your packing, Sabina. Or we won’t be ready to leave until Saturnalia.”
Don’t leave me, Annia thought, eyes traveling a touch uneasily to the curse tablet still lying on the stone bench, but her mother was already gone. And the Empress of Rome didn’t look all that happy about it either, Annia thought.
“Well—” The Empress rose, fluid and swaying in her black stola as she dropped her shawl over the curse tablet. She moved like one of her cats, a kind of lithe, connected glide. “What did you hear, little eavesdropper?”
“Nothing,” Annia said instantly.
“Really? Because you strike me as quite an observant little thing. Just like your mother.”
Annia offered her most wide-eyed expression, the one she adopted whenever anything turned up broken. You kill people, she thought. You write people’s names in curses, and their hearts burst. She didn’t know what Aunt Sabina meant about being powerless, because killing people with curse tablets sounded like power to Annia. It was children who were powerless. Children couldn’t do anything.
The Empress was still surveying Annia top to toe. “What?” Annia asked, edging backward.
“You’ll probably be as tall as your father by the time I come back. You already have his hair.”
“No, I don’t,” Annia objected before remembering that empresses weren’t supposed to be contradicted, and neither were family, and Aunt Sabina was both. But did that count if they were wrong? Because Annia’s hair was a soft sandy red, not brown like her father’s with his little bits of gray.
“Right here”—Aunt Sabina touched a finger to the crown of her head—“you’ve got a stray lock that sticks up no matter how hard you smooth it down. Just like your father’s.”
Annia touched her hair, defensive. “People think I’m a boy,” she found herself saying.
“Why do they think that?”
“The way I play.”
“And how do you play?”
Annia jutted out her jaw. “To win.”
Aunt Sabina didn’t smile, as most people did. People smiled with indulgence or they smiled with reproof, but they smiled, and Annia hated that. “Win what?” the Empress asked quite seriously.
Annia shrugged. “Everything.”
“And you shall win.” Aunt Sabina knelt down so she was on eye-level. “You shall win everything; I’ll make sure of it. Even from Britannia, I’ll be watching for you, Annia Galeria Faustina. I’ll imagine you starting your lessons, and playing with slave children, and scraping your knees. I’ll send you presents—a pot of woad like the old warriors used to wear, because you’d rather have war paint than dolls . . .”
I would, Annia thought, but didn’t say so. The Empress already seemed to know her far too well. The silence stretched.
But Aunt Sabina only smiled. “Let’s go find your mother.”
Annia kept the Empress in front of her the entire walk back through the gardens, warily. “Hug your aunt good-bye,” her mother said as they left, but Annia shook her head. “No,” she said, even though it made her mother frown and Aunt Sabina veil her watchful eyes with her lashes. Because Annia wasn’t afraid of heights or spiders, strangers or blood or the dark—but strange, fascinating, curse-casting Aunt Sabina definitely made her nervous.
VIX
Gesoriacum, a port in Gaul
Any soldier has his good-luck charms; the things that sift out through the rough passage of nomadic campaigns. The things that matter, for whatever reason. I had my own collection stowed in my pack. An amulet of Mars, given me by my father to keep me safe in battle. A gold ring with the engraved letters PARTHICUS, given off former Emperor Trajan’s own hand when I saved him from a Parthian archer. An earring, silver and glinting with garnets, from a woman I cared for and shouldn’t have. A blue scarf from the hair of yet another woman, one I still cared for. Small things, because a soldier never accumulates more than he can carry on a long day’s march.
But I’d somehow accumulated more over the years. I’d accumulated people, people I couldn’t divest as easily as I’d cut off my friend Titus. I couldn’t really afford carrying people about in my heart, not with an emperor’s enmity hanging over my head—but I did. And my heart was singing that morning in Gesoriacum as I thought, She’s here!
I was supposed to be doing any number of things: making preparations for the Emperor’s imminent arrival, reading a stack of reports from those officious little supply clerks called the frumentarii with their endless tattling of the latest rumors. And I was ignoring it all, rushing down the dock with my heart fluttering in my throat, because my wife had finally disembarked.
She let our daughters tackle me first, both of them pelting across the docks with their dark curls flying. They were getting big, but not too big yet to swoop against my armored chest, one in each arm. I smiled at their mother over their heads, and she smiled back.
“I got seasick,” Dinah complained, wrinkling her nose. My eldest, a fastidious little thing even at eight. At least, I thought she was eight. Children, even my own, all looked more or less the same age to me: small. “I threw up everywhere.”
“So did I,” Chaya confessed, looking worried. My second daughter always looked worried. She’d been born in the middle of an earthquake in Antioch; the world to Chaya was an uneasy place where even the ground under your feet couldn’t be trusted. “Antinous didn’t get seasick! It’s not fair!”
“Sorry, girls, you both inherited my stomach. Next time I’ll send for you by road.” Since it was summer and the seas calm, I’d had my family brought to Gaul by boat—even on a calm sea, I’d have been heaving my guts up just as badly as my little ones. I kissed their dark curls, setting them down so I could take my wife in my arms at last, but my tall son came at me next, and I clasped him by the shoulder rather than embracing him because he was sixteen and getting too big to be tousled and hugged. “Hello, Narcissus.”
“I hate it when you call me that,” he complained, ruffling
a hand over his curly hair. Narcissus was the boy in the myth who was so beautiful he’d fallen in love with his own reflection, and my adopted son Antinous put him to shame: straight-nosed, honey-haired, near as tall as me but far more graceful, with a lean-muscled body like a young Apollo and cheekbones that could cut marble. Unlike Narcissus, though, Antinous had not one drop of vanity.
“Antinous got in trouble,” Dinah said gleefully from my hip. “On the boat—”
“Tattler,” he accused her.
“You got caught kissing a girl in the hold!”
I gave him a look. “Was it someone’s wife?”
“She kissed me!” He grinned guiltily, and I could see his beautiful Bithynian mother in his smile. She hadn’t been a great passion of mine, just a girl who had kept my bed warm, but I felt enough responsibility to take charge of her young son after she died. I knew what happened to pretty children like Antinous when they didn’t have anyone to care for them. Even though I hadn’t sired him, he’d long since become my son. There’s more in life than blood.
“It was a clerk’s wife Antinous got caught kissing, and a painted little flirt of a thing she was, too,” my wife said tartly, and my heart jumped to hear her voice. I pushed through all my various children and at last, at last, scooped their mother up into my arms.
“I see you missed me, Tribune.” Mirah wound her arms tight about my neck: my russet-haired wife with her short freckled nose and her eyes a warm blue against the green scarf she’d tied about her hair to keep it from tangling in the wind. My wife, a Jew like my own mother, a Jew with all the fire of her hotheaded cousins who swore that one day they would liberate Judaea from Rome—all their fire, but a good deal more sense. Sense, fire, and sweetness too, and when you put those things together with that snap of laughter in her blue eyes and enough skill in the kitchen to make angels weep, you had a very grateful ex-legionary and current desk mule who counted himself lucky.