Lady of the Eternal City (56 page)

Everything that comes from me gets ruined
, I’d told Sabina bleakly.
Including all my children.

Not quite
, I thought now, and my shoulders heaved in a sob of relief.
Not quite.

Maybe only because I hadn’t raised Annia. Maybe only because she’d been reared far away from me and my turmoil, raised by my best friend, who was a far better father than I ever was.

But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that at least one of my mistakes had turned golden instead of black. I’d taken the Empress of Rome in my arms on a dry island, and that colossal recklessness had not for once brought death and misfortune in its wake. It brought one joyful, gleaming miracle of a girl.

My daughter. She didn’t make up for the children I had lost.

But she was still a miracle.

“You know—” Sabina lifted my face from her shoulder, cupping my cheek in her hand. “Annia looks so much like you. Every day I’ve seen it, watching her grow. Your hair—” Fingers sliding back into my hair, over the spot where one obstinate lock kicked up. “Not just the color. That one wild bit in the back; Annia has it, too.”

“She has your eyes.” I traced my thumb over Sabina’s lashes. My senses were drinking the world in; drinking her in—the softness of her skin, the smell of her perfume, the pool of her eyes. “Bluer than mine.”

“Your height.” Sabina stretched toward me like a willow. “Your temper—”

“Your—” I couldn’t think. I couldn’t think, but it didn’t matter because Sabina kissed me.

It was all storm when we came together and made Annia. Here under the blue sky and blazing sun, it was tentative, my lips brushing hers as though they’d forgotten how to kiss. Her cool hands linked behind my neck, pulling me closer, and that was when I felt fire licking through my veins. My unfeeling body roaring to life, and all because Sabina’s mouth was opening under mine like a lotus. The cool sweet taste of her, the feel of her hands pulling me closer, the smoothness of her skin against my rough jaw—she lit a firestorm in my veins with one kiss.

Mirah
, I couldn’t help thinking, because she was the last woman I’d kissed in passion—but Mirah’s bitter shade was gone. Even her living presence hadn’t banished Sabina from my bones. Mirah had belonged to her God, but I belonged to Rome, and Sabina
was
Rome, the Empress of Rome and the mother of my only remaining child, back in my arms where she belonged.

I was crushing her against me and ravaging her mouth for more, her bare shoulders like flame under my hands as I pulled her down to the rich earth between the green vines. She was stripping the lion skin from my shoulders and I was tearing at the knot of fabric that held her dress together. Her small breast was honey and silk in my rough hand, and it was a good thing we were off in the vines, off in the middle of nowhere where no prying eyes could find us, because I couldn’t have stopped if one of her Praetorians had leveled a spear at my throat. I spread the lion skin down over the earth and spread her on top of it, and then it was nothing but her limbs coiling about mine, entrapping me length against naked, sun-warmed length.

She slid her hand along my shoulder, caressing an old scar she knew was there and chuckling low in her throat in the way that had always seized me. I never knew another woman who laughed so much in bed. “Passion”—she murmured into my mouth between kisses—“is for the young.”

“Bugger that.” Ever since Judaea I had felt old, an aging man with nothing before me but regrets. But now I had fire in my veins instead of blood, and I could have conquered Parthia with nothing but a single sword. I could have raced my youngest daughter across the length of the Empire and won at a sprint. I could have strode out onto the sands of the Colosseum and taken on every champion my father had ever bested. I was Vercingetorix the Red, and I was no longer a dead man.

I buried my lips at the base of Sabina’s throat in the spot that had always made her gasp, and she gasped now, her whole supple body arching around me as I slid home into sweet, familiar flesh. I knew her so well; I knew every inch of her skin as though it were my own. I’d had her more times than I could count; I’d loved her and hated her, wept with her and fought with her, but I had never stopped
wanting
her. I’d wanted her when I watched her writhe over Lucius as she threatened him; I’d wanted her in the perfumed and magical dark of Eleusis; I’d wanted her when she was a long-haired girl in her father’s house. I’d wanted her when I was just a grubby slave brat first laying eyes on a pearled doll, wanted her without being old enough yet to know what I wanted her for. She was poison in my blood, poison so fire-sweet a man would be happy to die in it, right here in this green haze of vines under a blazing sun. My Empress.

She never stopped kissing me even as I moved in her, that sweet mouth drinking me savagely as though she could draw the soul out of me and into her own, and maybe she had. I made a noise against her mouth, half curse and half groan as I pulled her long thigh around me. “Hell’s gates,” I breathed, moving deep, moving slow. “What do you do to me?”

Her eyes in their lapis lines were an endless drowning blue. “I love you,” she said against my lips. “I love you”—as the edge of pleasure rushed at us—“and you love me.”

She said it again late that night in her chamber, the moon high in the sky and throwing silver shapes through the window across our tangled limbs and tangled fingers. She said it matter-of-factly, her sleek head tucked against my chest, and I laughed.

“Love never worked very well with us, did it?” I pointed out. “Always leaving each other for one reason or another—”

“Adventure.” Kissing my chest. “Or ambition.” Kissing my throat. “Or power, or war, or marriage.” Kissing her way up toward my mouth. “Do you see any of those reasons here now, Vercingetorix?”

I pulled her over me, moonlit and beautiful. She wore nothing but the single garnet-and-silver earring I’d taken from my pouch and hung back beside her throat where it belonged. “I see you,” I told her. “Empress of Rome and Annia’s mother—and I’m not sure which is more impressive.”

“And I see us two,” Sabina said, giving an odd little inward smile. “At last I am just two, not three.”

I cocked my head. “What does that mean?”

“It means I will not leave you again,” Sabina said quietly. “Not for any reason, Vercingetorix. Hadrian gave me my life back, what there is left of it, and I swear by all the gods that I will share it with you.”

SABINA

A.D. 137, Six Months Later

“Can’t you be the one to tell her?” Sabina begged. “I’m a coward.”

“You’re the Empress of Rome,” Faustina said. “Act like it!”

“You’re the one who should be Empress,” Sabina muttered, and it took a whole half year’s worth of bullying before Faustina wore her down. A half year of tending Hadrian’s fevers and nosebleeds and going home to Vix’s arms in private—watching Lucius Ceionius return from Pannonia, oddly thin and still coughing; hearing Hadrian complain about him—“He spends most of his time in the bathhouse trying to sweat out that cough! Does he think he can rule an empire from a sweating room?” Half a year, and Faustina had worked on her every day, never pestering, just tilting her head to one side in that charming way of hers and
insisting
. And somehow the Empress of Rome found herself standing in her emptied villa in a state of pure panic, waiting for her illicit daughter.

“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.”