Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  Hadrian quirked a brow. “Are you flattering me, Vibia Sabina?”

  “Is it flattery if it’s truth?” Perhaps it was both. Sabina rubbed a thumb along the band of the gold-and-iron ring Hadrian had put on her finger at their wedding: gold for flattery, soft but pretty; iron for truth, hard but strong—both were layered together in her ring and in her marriage, quite easily. “I didn’t like hearing you say you were undoing Trajan’s victories, either,” she found herself saying. “But now I’m proud of you.”

  Hadrian preened just a little, and Sabina smiled, surprised to find how sincerely she meant it. She might not like her husband very much, but there were things she had always admired about him. “So, is it a journey to Hispania next?”

  “Gaul first. I will build Empress Plotina a fitting temple at the city of her birthplace. After Gaul, Hispania. It is time I made an appearance in the province that reared me, and Hispania will prove a fitting launch to visit Africa and Mauretania.”

  Africa. Sabina caught her breath, envisioning huge dappled cats and tawny skies and the great Iseum that Cleopatra’s daughter had built in mourning for her lost Egypt . . .

  Wait, she told herself. Wait.

  “You are silent, Vibia Sabina.” Hadrian slanted a brow at her. “I’d expected to hear you pleading to come along.”

  “Oh, I long to see Africa and Mauretania and all the rest,” Sabina said frankly. “But an empress cannot always have what she wants. I believe I could be of use to you in Africa; the system of grain dispersal there is something I’ve been looking into—but if you feel I would be more useful in Rome, then back to Rome I will go.” Sabina looked at him, matching his look of regal calm. “I go where you need me, Caesar.”

  “That was not always your way.”

  “It is, now.”

  Hadrian regarded her, eyes glittering in the moonlight. “I meet tomorrow with my secretaries and my legates,” he said at last. “To discuss the next leg of our tour, and what matters must be seen to in each province. Attend, if you please. I would hear your opinions. And now, I will bid you good night.”

  “Good night, my dear.”

  He gave her a smile, a friendly smile, and she inclined her head in turn. He tramped off toward his quarters, his Praetorians clinking behind, and it wasn’t till he was gone and Sabina was left with her own guards that she allowed herself a small, soundless laugh.

  “Lady?” one of her guards ventured. “Do you wish to return to your quarters?”

  “Not one bit,” Sabina said. “Wait here.”

  “Lady, a Praetorian’s duty—”

  “Is to wait when his Empress tells him.” Sabina tossed the hem of her furred cloak over one arm. “Your Empress wants a closer look at the wall.”

  Her footsteps quickened until she was skimming the frosty grass—how long had it been since she had the freedom to run anywhere? She reached the outer staircase that led to the top of the wall and took the steps two at a time, reaching the top in a final burst of breath. Skidding to a halt, she laughed up at the star-wheeling sky. “Gods,” she heard herself exclaiming aloud in wonder, “it’s glorious!”

  The whitewashed stones drank the moonlight, bouncing it back so the wall was lit as bright as day. The fort on one side was just a collection of guttering lights, torches that glowed a sickly orange in comparison to the stark light of the stars, and to the north there was nothing but a sea of black and the whistling of trees. Someday, perhaps in five years or so, the wall would stretch out in both directions, an infinite gleaming line from horizon to horizon, but for now it was just an oasis in the night, the whiteness disappearing abruptly a mile in either direction. When Sabina looked down at her own hands, they looked like they’d turned to ice-white marble, and her wolf-skin cloak to pure gleaming silver. “Glorious,” she said again softly, and felt the beauty stab in her throat like pain.

  There was another reason she’d wanted to be alone here, alone under the moon, and she slowly drew it out from under her cloak. A letter from her sister, along with a small package; both arrived this afternoon. Sabina opened the package first, and something small fell into her hand: a cameo of carved glass, showing an exquisitely etched profile white against blue. At the sight of that profile—a child’s short nose and stubborn chin, her unruly hair and the eyes that had been carved almost to glare . . . “Oh,” Sabina said softly, and her throat seized with pain of an altogether different kind. “Oh,” she said again, and her hands shook as she broke the seal on the letter.

  Annia as she looks now, her sister had written. I shall have her carved again next year, if you are still away from Rome. This way you’ll always know what your niece looks like, no matter how long you’re gone on your travels!

  Clever Faustina, always assuming letters might be read by outside eyes. Niece. Sabina had trained herself to use that word from the first day.

  “You should hold her,” Faustina had said after the birth, coming to Sabina’s bedside with an armload of blankets. The villa was deep in the hills of Toscana, a quiet estate where Faustina’s mother had retired after widowhood—she’d welcomed them with open arms and a house emptied of slaves, acting as midwife herself so there would be no witness who could say the Empress of Rome had given birth. Faustina and her mother looked after everything, and afterward stood like two blond sentinels with a wailing bundle held between them.

  “Even only once,” Sabina heard her stepmother say, “hold your daughter!”

  Over the mass of blankets, Sabina had seen a dome of forehead like a rosy peach and a pair of furious waving fists, and she shut her eyes before she could see more. “My niece,” she said firmly, or as firmly as she could after being racked by two unending days of labor. “I have to think of her that way. Always, not one slip. Not if she’s to be safe. So take her away. Please.”

  Niece.

  Never daughter.

  Think it, Sabina thought, staring at Annia’s stubborn carved profile. Let yourself think it, just once. There’s no one here on the wall but you.

  Daughter. My daughter. Mine.

  She found herself on her knees on the stones, head bowed, gulping for breath and gripping the tiny cameo so hard it hurt.

  Astounding how easy it had been to fool everyone. Hadrian as the new Emperor had still been traveling in the east all year; in his absence, the court in Rome had not demanded Sabina’s attendance. Faustina had retired to her mother’s villa in the country for the final six months of her official confinement; Sabina had let it be known she would accompany her sister—and Faustina had returned to Rome a proud young mother, presenting her firstborn in the arms of its wet nurse to all her friends. “No one suspects?” Sabina had pressed, returning to Rome sometime after Faustina. Returning once she was sure her milk had dried up and her body returned to its narrow shape. “You’re certain no one suspects?”

  “Not a one. I’ve been playing proud mother all over Rome.”

  “Do people snicker?” Sabina had asked with a stab of shame so deep it was almost self-loathing. “Only seven months since you and Titus married—”

  A graceful shrug that stirred Faustina’s ripples of blond hair. “If they snicker, they do it behind my back. And they aren’t precisely wrong, you know, if they think I have no morals. I don’t. I would have seduced Titus before the wedding, if I could have. I tried. He was too principled!”

  Principled or not, people had snickered at Titus, too. Titus, who had extended his blessing on the plan from the cell where he’d been immured, and who had proceeded to claim Annia for his own once he came out of it. Dear gods, how much Sabina owed her best friend and her sister!

  Sabina blinked her stinging eyes. She read the page of news Faustina had written her—Annia’s latest scrapes, breakages, adventures—and then she touched the cameo with one fingertip. “I miss you, little one,” she said softly. “I know you don’t miss me.” Annia had looked so wary,
that afternoon she’d been brought to say good-bye. The way I was staring, she probably thought I wanted to eat her. Sabina hadn’t been able to stop staring. At those freckles, at those blue-gray eyes (my eyes, you got my eyes), at that unruly reddish hair (your father’s hair, definitely). Wondering what else Annia had inherited.

  “You had grass stains on your knees,” she told the cameo, remembering so clearly. “Of course you did. My love for adventure and your father’s love for trouble? Of course you’re a girl with scabbed elbows and grass stains rather than a lapful of embroidery. You’d like it out here on the wall—I’d wrap you in this wolf-skin cloak and point up at the stars and tell you all the stories behind them . . .”

  It was a good thing she’d been whispering to herself, because an annoyed male voice came through the dark then and interrupted her. “You aren’t supposed to be out here alone, Lady.”

  “Vix.” Sabina looked over her shoulder, palming the cameo and letter back inside her cloak. “How does anyone as large as you manage to sneak up so silently?” she managed to say. Her heart was beating hard, as though she’d been caught doing something illicit. Weren’t you? the thought whispered.

  I haven’t been caught yet, the Empress thought grimly. And for Annia’s sake, and my sister’s, and her husband’s, I never will be.

  Vix was coming up the stone steps, helmet tucked under his arm. He threw an inky shadow across the wall, tall as a colossus. “What are you doing up here?”

  “Seeing the wall.” She drew up her knees beneath her wolf skins, propping her folded arms on top. “I had to sit like a statue this afternoon during the formal presentation, while the Emperor got to clamber all over it. He can be adventurous”—Sabina pillowed her cheek on her folded arms—“but I have to look docile.”

  “I haven’t met an empress yet who was docile.” Vix came to stand over her, looking out over the darkness north of the wall.

  “Well, we need to give the appearance of docility, anyway.”

  “You can’t even manage that, Lady.”

  His voice coming down through the dark was dourly amused. Sabina tilted her head up at his craggy shape looming over her. “Why did you come tramping up after me?” she asked. “I’ve hardly seen hide or hair of you through all these months in Britannia.” And long before that, truth be told—he was forever busy with his guards, his slates and dispatches, his endless rides off to the various garrisons. And he never, ever stood guard at her back if he could help it.

  “I’m avoiding you.” He spoke bluntly. “But I’m also avoiding the Emperor tonight, not to mention my wife. So if it’s a choice between rounding you up, going home to her, or guarding him, I’ll take you.”

  “Why are you avoiding your wife?” Sabina had met Vix’s wife once or twice, in Antioch back at the informal court Emperor Trajan kept in the east between campaigns. A fiery creature, taller than Sabina, with a glint of amusement in her eye.

  Vix grunted.

  “Well,” Sabina said softly. “I am glad to have you here.”

  She could feel the cameo in her hand, the carved edges etching into her palm. Annia’s small, carved profile. Hard to tell yet in a child’s unformed face—but Sabina thought she might grow up with Vix’s nose.

  The Empress patted the stones beside her. “Sit.”

  Annia’s father hesitated a moment, standing there in the battered lion skin across his armored shoulders, which the moon had bleached to the color of bone, and the lock of his hair that like his daughter’s never lay flat. Sabina remembered moving her hand over that lock of hair when they helped each other dress, that afternoon nearly five years ago on the barren hilltop in Selinus.

  The day they had made Annia. Not that Vix knew that.

  “So you’ve decided you want my company?” He sat down beside her on the stones, resting his elbows on his knees. “You’ve done a good job yourself of avoiding me, these past few years. Since you became Empress of Rome, anyway.”

  “I didn’t avoid you because I got grand, Vix.” In fact she’d missed their old easy camaraderie desperately. They’d been lovers on and off since they’d both been eighteen, but even more than lovers they had been friends. “I thought it would be safer, keeping my distance. After . . .”

  “Selinus?” he finished.

  Sabina jumping up into Vix’s arms, mouths clashing and tasting salt tears, both of them bitter and sick with grief for the Emperor they had both loved. Vix’s mouth at her breast, consuming her, marking her as she breathed in his ear, “Shut up and take me.” “Yes,” Sabina admitted, pulling her furs closer. “Not the wisest thing we’ve ever done.”

  It hadn’t been love, that savage coupling in the wild grass. Trajan had just died, and they had mourned him together, united in their dread that Hadrian would follow on the throne. Making something in that moment for which Hadrian would have destroyed them both; oh, how the gods must have been laughing!

  “No harm came from it, at least.” Vix shrugged, and Sabina bit her own tongue, feeling the cameo’s edges again.

  “No. No harm.” Her throat was getting thick, and she cast about for something else to say—something that didn’t catch her throat as though she were swallowing thorns. “Did you know, Hadrian’s spoken of making further reforms to the legion regulations? I told him he should consult with you.”

  “I don’t want him to consult me. If he never says a word to me again, I’ll die happy.”

  The sharpness in Vix’s voice made Sabina blink.

  “I serve him,” Vix went on. “He’s got me there. That’s what happens when you’ve got a family—they’re the sword for someone like Hadrian to hold over you—”

  They are, Sabina thought. Oh, they are!

  “—but I’ll be damned if I help him. Not ever.”

  “Isn’t it easier than fighting him?”

  “Is that why you’re playing docile Empress all of a sudden?”

  Sabina lifted her cheek off her furred knees, raising her head to catch his eyes directly. “Back on Selinus, we’d have done anything to keep Hadrian from taking the purple. But it happened. Like it or not, he is our Emperor. So shouldn’t we help him? Help him to do great things? I will, if I can.”

  It was part of the promise she’d sworn to herself, telling Annia good-bye. “I’ll send you presents,” she had chattered inanely, just to say something that might get through Annia’s wary stare. All the while thinking, I will give you more than presents, Annia Galeria Faustina. I will make this world over for you. I will make it safe, I will make it beautiful. I will make this Empire your haven. I am Empress of Rome, and I swear it.

  “You want Hadrian to change?” Vix flung the words at her like stones. “He’s an evil, heartless bastard. He’ll never change.”

  “Probably not.” He might never be a good man, but if he could just listen to her about the necessity of acting like one . . . “Even if it proves impossible, Vix, I think we shall have to try. Because we’ve seen mad emperors, you and I, mad ones and wicked ones, and I won’t let my husband go down that road.”

  “He’s already down that road!” Vix snarled. “He paved that bloody road, and you want me to help?”

  “What choice do we have?”

  Vix let out a bitter bark of laughter, fingering the little medallion at his throat. A medallion of Mars, Sabina knew. It had always brought him luck. She wondered if he still had the silver earring she’d once given him as a lover’s token. That had brought him luck, too.

  “So what do you mean to do, Vix? Leave Imperial service?” Sabina drew a finger down a fold of wolf fur over her knee, feeling a stab at the thought of losing Vix for good. Of course, he’d been lost to her a long time, long before he ever married his gingery wife. For all the heat that flared whenever he and Sabina drew close, they always ended up pricking each other in the end. Pricking till they both bled. They’d always had different stars to foll
ow, and the draw of the stars had always been stronger than the draw of the flesh.

  But Vix gone for good, not even seen in passing anymore with his lion skin and his infectious grin?

  We have a daughter, Sabina almost said. I bore you a daughter, and she’s being raised by my sister and your oldest friend. But it was no way to hold him.

  “Will you leave?” she asked instead.

  “No.” A harsh bark of a laugh. “I haven’t got the nerve to flee. Your husband saw to that.”

  “Why?”

  “He threatened me.” Even in the dark, she saw his throat move. “And he threatened my son.”

  “What did he threaten?”

  In anger Vix was always a storm of motion: pacing, striding, shouting. But now he was still as a boulder. “None of your business.”

  Quietly Sabina asked, “Did he carry out any of those threats? Against you, or your son?”

  “No.”

  “You see? He is changing, at least in his actions if not his soul. Otherwise—”

  Vix rose in a clatter of mail. He dropped his big hand across the back of her neck and raised her effortlessly, pulling her up against him, his fingers sliding around to circle her throat. His hand on her naked skin was as warm as though he’d been sitting by a roaring fire. Even in this cold northern place under the icy stars, Vix could never be cold. His blood ran hotter and faster than ordinary. But then, he’d never been ordinary, had he?

  “Sabina.” He whispered her name. “Do not talk to me of how much good he can do.”

  He released her, so abruptly she staggered. When she regained her balance, she saw her bodyguard—her perfect Imperial guard, her lifelong friend and sometime lover, the father of the child the world had no idea she’d ever borne—descending the steps toward the ground, almost running. Leaving her alone in the moonlight, on Hadrian’s wall.