by Kate Quinn
“I have stood before crowds of thousands,” Sabina said aloud, pacing the length of the atrium. “I have traveled the wildest wastes of the Empire, I have marched in the blood of a conquering army, I have survived decades as Empress of Rome.” Turning on her heel, pacing the other direction. “How is it possible that I am terrified by a mere conversation?”
“Who are you talking to, Lady?” Boil’s voice came from behind. It had been Vix’s idea for her to hire his old friend into her guard. “He’s been struggling lately,” Vix had said. “Says he’d rather eat his own spine than go back to Judaea. He’d guard you well, and keep our secrets, too.” It had been a request she was happy to grant.
Sabina turned. “Has my niece arrived?”
“Saw her coming up through the vineyard at a good clip, Lady.” Boil smiled. “And the villa’s been emptied. The slaves were happy to get a day to themselves.”
“Thank you.” Sabina did not intend to have eavesdroppers. She’d have given Boil the afternoon away from the villa as well, but he refused. “I’m not leaving the Empress of Rome without a single guard,” he said flatly. “Vix’d flay me alive.”
A smile. Vix was here more days than not, and of course Boil knew why. They were discreet—even if Hadrian no longer paid any heed to his wife’s bed or who slept there, Sabina saw no reason to cause gossip—but guards knew everything. Boil kept watch on the nights Vix stayed, to keep the other guards and slaves from knowing.
Annia came up the terrace, taking the steps two at a time. She wore a blue tunic tucked at the hips, and her breath puffed in the cold air. She snapped off a legionary’s salute to Boil, the one Vix had taught her, and sailed into the atrium with a grin and a curtsy for Sabina. “You’re alive!”
Sabina blinked, knocked off guard. “Was I supposed to be dead?”
“You haven’t come to a single dinner party or public festival all summer and autumn,” Annia said. “There’s a rumor going about Rome that the Emperor had you chained up and is starving you to death. I’m glad he’s not.” Another curtsy.
Sabina nodded dismissal to Boil, repressing the urge to fidget. Vix hadn’t been keen on Faustina’s notion to bring their daughter into the secret. “The fewer who know the better! It’s for her own safety.”
“At the beginning,” Sabina pointed out. “Hadrian was different then. Now I think if I told him he’d just blink and say, ‘How careless of you.’”
“And you’d risk that?”
“No. But to tell Annia seems a risk worth taking. She’s old enough to hold a secret, and she should know her own blood.”
Vix had looked absolutely petrified. “I’ll be there if you wish it,” he gulped, “but Hell’s gates, I’d rather charge a field of Parthian savages.”
“I’ll get her used to the idea,” Sabina said with a kiss to the side of his neck. “And send her to talk to you afterward.”
Now, looking at Annia’s candid blue-gray eyes, Sabina wished she’d made Vix stay by her side.
“You’ve gotten me out of an afternoon at the theatre,” Annia was saying, oblivious. “For which I thank you.”
“You don’t like the theatre?”
“I’d have to sit with my betrothed.” Annia made a face. “And people stare at little Lucius and me, and they laugh. We look ridiculous.”
“I doubt you’ll ever have to marry him.” Knowing she was stalling, Sabina sank down on a couch and indicated the other end for Annia. “Was there someone else you were thinking of? Hoping for?”
“Maybe.” Annia flopped down, curling her long legs to one side. She avoided Sabina’s gaze, her voice bleak. “But I can’t have him, not if the Emperor wants otherwise. Girls don’t usually get what they want, not when powerful men have other ideas.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Sabina found herself smiling. “I’ve usually found a way to get what I want, in one way or another.”
“What did you want when you were my age?”
“Adventure. Travel. The world.” And she’d gotten those things, if not quite in the way she’d imagined.
“And now?”
Vix. Vix giving her his tilted grin over a pillow, Vix’s hard chest at her back through the night, vibrating heat as though his blood burned hotter than an ordinary man’s . . . Just Vix.
Annia was still looking at her, quizzical. “What I want now,” Sabina said, “is to tell you something—”
“Lady?” Boil’s voice interrupted, apologetic. “A visitor to see you.”
“I am not receiving visitors today.”
“I told him, Lady, but he insisted upon waiting. Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator.”
“Tell him to return tomorrow.” Sabina looked back to Annia, and saw an odd expression flit across that freckled face. “What?”
“What does Pedanius want with you?”
“He still wants to be Imperial heir instead of Lucius, of course. His grandfather has been on a rampage about it, with Lucius returning from Pannonia so ill. Pedanius probably hopes I will speak with the Emperor on his behalf.”
Annia looked strangely stiff. “Will the Emperor—”
“No, he won’t change the succession. At least not yet.” Hadrian in his fading health was stubborn as an ox—“I can hardly put Lucius aside because he coughs too much!”
Something occurred to Sabina, and she looked at her daughter. “Pedanius isn’t the one you have a liking for, is he? From what his grandfather once told me, he’s quite infatuated with you.” Pedanius wouldn’t have been Sabina’s first choice for her daughter—he was so twitchy and nervous now, and then there were his ruined looks. But Annia was hardly the kind of girl to reject a man just because his smile had been spoiled. “If you welcomed his suit, I might be able to suggest a betrothal—”
Annia erupted from the couch so violently she nearly fell over backward. “I’d rather eat a snake!”
Sabina rose. “I didn’t mean to—”
“The Emperor isn’t going to give me to Pedanius, is he?”
There was such blind panic on the girl’s face, Sabina laid a hand on her shoulder. “No.”
“Good.” Annia’s mouth pressed into a hard line, just like Vix when he was chewing on hatred. “I’d marry a little boy over that foul coward any day.”
“What happened?” Sabina’s prepared speech had fallen aside. “What’s so terrible about Pedanius?”
“Never mind.” Annia’s shoulders rose and fell in a remarkably cynical shrug. “No one ever believes me.”
“I will always believe you,” Sabina said quietly. “Tell me.”
Annia hesitated.
Sabina cupped her daughter’s face in her hands. “Tell me,” she repeated, and felt her heart thudding.
Another shrug. The casual shrug this time: Vix when he was about to underplay something. “Pedanius tried to rape me when I was twelve.” So flat, so matter-of-fact. “I kicked him in the groin, so hard he—well, let’s say he’s half a eunuch, I kicked him so hard. And it got me out of trouble that day, but ever since, he’s been swearing up and down that someday he’ll be emperor and then he really will get to rape me. As many times as he wants.”
A long pause.
“I see.” Sabina fought to keep her voice even. “And you thought no one would believe you? That your father wouldn’t believe you?”
“Oh, he’d have believed me,” Annia acknowledged. “But he’d have tried to do something about it. Go to Servianus, and you know that old bastard—” She broke off, biting her lip. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t—”
“He is an old bastard. Go on.”
“Well, he’d have just said I was a lying little harlot. And he’d go trumpeting his grandson’s innocence to everyone, and they’d believe his version because he’s a man. I’d be disgraced and so would my father, so . . .” Annia trailed off.
“I see.” Sabina
exhaled a sigh so slow and rage-filled that it was nearly motionless. “You could have come to me, however. Not only would I have believed you, I could have done something about it. It’s one of the nice things about being Empress, Annia. You have guards who, if ordered, will haul someone out into a gutter and eviscerate him. No matter whose great-nephew he is.”
Annia gave a crooked smile. “I was a little nervous of you back then.”
“Not anymore, I hope.”
“No, I think you’re rather splendid.”
Sabina wanted to pull her daughter into her arms, but Annia would just get irked and pull away scowling. Vix-like. She settled for dropping one fierce kiss on Annia’s forehead and released her. “Well,” she said, and struggled to keep her voice even. “You have no more need to fear that vicious gap-toothed bastard, I promise you that. Even if the Emperor does seek an heir to replace Lucius, I swear it will not be Pedanius.”
“Good.” Annia hesitated. “It’s not just what happened to me, you know. People don’t see what he is, because he’s handsome and charming. Well, he used to be, anyway. But he can drop that charm like a mask and that’s when he’s bragging about the men he’s killed—”
“Killed?”
“He was boasting.” Annia wrinkled her nose. “He bragged he’d killed before, and he showed me a ring he took off a man’s body as a prize, and said he’d get his hands bloody again if it would make him emperor.”
Sabina felt her heart begin to pound, and for an entirely different reason. “Annia,” she said, “did Pedanius say who he killed?”
“No.” Annia looked scornful. “He’s stupid, but he’s not that stupid. He’s careful never to say anything he can’t deny. He’s very good at not getting caught.”
Dear gods—oh, dear gods . . . “This ring he showed you. What did it look like?”
“Just a ring. He hit Marcus with it—”
“Think, Annia. Any detail. Anything you remember.”
Annia chewed her lip. “Gold,” she said. “With a yellow stone? Not very large.”
“It wouldn’t be,” Sabina said faintly. Because he didn’t like gaudy baubles, so Hadrian had said, “A topaz, then. The color of your eyes.”
Oh, dear gods.
“Aunt Sabina?”
The Empress found herself sitting on the end of the couch, her breath coming in short silent gasps, Annia’s anxious hand on her shoulder.
Pedanius Fuscus.
“Aunt Sabina?”
Pedanius Fuscus.
Currently outside her atrium, waiting to speak with her.
Sabina looked up into Annia’s worried young face. “My dear girl,” she said, and managed a smile. “I had something to tell you today, but you ended up having something to tell me instead. Something far more important, so the chat I planned is going to have to wait. I want you to—”
“Aunt!” The impatient voice came at the end of the atrium, and Sabina saw the hatred prickle through Annia’s whole body before she even saw the boy in his purple-bordered toga. “You’d keep your favorite great-nephew waiting?” Pedanius said, trying an ingratiating smile. His broken teeth looked like fangs.
Sabina rose, smoothing the folds of her stola. She turned her head to Annia, speaking very, very low. “Run home. Don’t walk, run. Tell your father there is a ring that should have stayed on the hand of Antinous, and now I know where it is.”
“But—” A glance at Pedanius, and a blanch of horror that Sabina hated to see on such a young face. “You mean—”
“By the time you come back,” Sabina said even more softly, “he will be in shackles. Go, my love.”
Another narrow look at Pedanius, and Annia was gone through the other end of the atrium. A flash of blue linen and russet hair—and Sabina turned back to her guest. To her husband’s great-nephew, whom she had always rather liked. Whom she had saved from his beating, and carried home with a pillow beneath his head.
“Aunt,” he said again, spreading his arms as though for an embrace as he came closer. “Why send Annia away? I have a few words for her—”
But Sabina stopped him in his tracks with an upraised palm. “Gnaeus Pedanius Fuscus Salinator,” she said like a judge. “Did you push Antinous into the Nile?”
His arms dropped.
“Did you?” Sabina repeated.
He ran a tongue over his lips, and one foot tapped against the mosaics.
“Answer me,” Sabina said coldly. “Did you kill Antinous?”
He shrugged, looking petulant. “Yes.”
Sabina exhaled. Felt the prick of tears in her eyes—tears of relief? Of rage? She had no idea. “Why?”
Pedanius was pacing back and forth a little, eyeing her. “Not good,” he muttered. “Not good . . .”
“You could say that.” Sabina raised her voice. “Boil!”
“I didn’t plan this,” Pedanius said rapidly. “I was supposed to be here with you when the news came—innocent, you know. The dutiful heir with the Empress of Rome, it looks right, us together when the messenger arrives—you could be first to acclaim me—”
“News of what?” Sabina felt as though her skull were going to explode. “Acclaim you as what?”
“Emperor,” Pedanius said, as though that were obvious. “It all happens today.”
He was still pacing, little useless steps. Edging closer. Sabina stilled herself, nailing him with her eyes. “What. Happens. Today?”
“Everything.” A vague wave of the hand. “I didn’t count on this. On Annia . . .” Gnawing his lip, he looked like a little boy suddenly. “Whore,” he muttered. “Doesn’t matter, no one will believe her.”
“I do. You knocked Antinous over the head, you took the ring from his hand, and you pushed him into the river. You showed Annia the ring. It was a ring I knew well. And if you think Hadrian will not have you killed, you are a fool as well as a murderer.” Sabina raised her voice again. “Boil!”
“If you’re calling for your guard,” said Pedanius, “he’s dead.”
“I do not believe that for a moment.” Vix’s enormous, rock-hard right-hand man could never be taken down by a boy like this. “Boil!”
“He caught me eavesdropping.” Pedanius hedged closer. “I was just hearing bits, but Annia was telling you about—well. I wish you hadn’t sent her out, but I can find her later. She’s not as important as she thinks she is.” Another step. No one appeared in the doorway behind him. “I’m sorry, Aunt. I was just supposed to be sitting with you this afternoon, when the news arrived. I really was. You were supposed to be my witness.”
“What did you do to my guard?” My only guard. The thought went through Sabina like a spike of ice. She had wanted an empty house to speak to Annia of her true parentage, a house where there would be no listening ears . . . And now there were no listening ears when she needed them so badly. “Boil!” she shouted again, but no huge comforting shape in Praetorian armor loomed between the columns.
“He said he’d lead me to the other atrium to wait. I got him in the neck, from behind.” That was when Pedanius drew a dagger from the folds of his toga—a blade with a fancy gold-tooled hilt. Such a silly weapon, Sabina thought, to kill a man like Boil. A man who had survived three separate wars in three separate corners of the Empire, only to be killed by a boy with sweat on his upper lip and an overdecorated dagger.
A boy advancing on her, blade in hand. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and sounded nervous. “You were supposed to live through it all. Blame that bitch Annia—”
Run. Sabina sent the thought after her daughter like an arrow. Run like the wind, Annia. Because I can’t. She was no fleet young Amazon, and Pedanius would be on her like a cowardly dog the moment she showed him her back. Just as he’d done with Boil.
She put her chin up instead, stared him down. “So your plan has changed.” Coldly. “You’ll murder the Empress
of Rome rather than escape what’s coming to you?”
“Nothing’s coming to me but the purple. As long as Hadrian doesn’t find out. And he won’t. He’ll be dead first.”
“You stupid child.” Sabina loaded every word with scorn. “You might be able to kill a lone woman in an empty villa, but the Emperor will not be such an easy target. You think your little plot can get through all the layers that surround him?”
“I’ve got someone with him already.” Pedanius threw it at her. “Someone he’ll never suspect. He’ll be dead before he hears a word about you.”
“Who is with them?”
Pedanius smiled, but sweat ran down his face despite the cold. “I’m not telling you.”
“Who?” A Praetorian who had been bribed? A slave with a smuggled sword? Emperor Domitian had been stabbed by a freedman with a dagger hidden in a false sling; Emperor Caligula by his own Praetorians. If some bribed killer got close enough, what would they find? Hadrian, sick at heart and sick of body, retreated into the inner sanctum of his villa like an old tortoise pulled into its shell. A bitter, aging man wrapped in furs: an easy target.
Pedanius came a step closer. Sabina gazed at him unblinking.
“Who have you bribed to kill the Emperor?”
Pedanius swallowed, raising the dagger and leveling it at her. “Don’t look at me.”
“Will it be poison for him? Or the sword?”
“Shut your eyes.”
“If you want to kill me, child, you’ll have to do it as I watch.”