Lady of the Eternal City (57 page)

“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.”

“I said, stop looking at me—”

“No.”
Sabina snapped her voice like a whip as she advanced, stalking him until she could feel the dagger’s tip prick through the silk of her
stola
, right over the heart. She grabbed the blade roughly, redirected the point higher to the bare flesh above her breast and below the shoulder. Squeezed the blade’s edge until it bit into her flesh, and did not let go. “You fell on Antinous from behind, and Boil too, but I refuse to make it easy for you. You look me in the eye while you kill me, you murdering little
coward
.”

She stared at him with eyes of ice. Pedanius’s gaze wavered. She could feel the blade quiver, feel blood begin to seep through her fingers from the edge. For a moment she thought she had won, that he would fall to his knees at her feet. That she could take the dagger from him, bind him, run to warn Hadrian of the danger that stalked within his own villa—

Then Pedanius Fuscus gave a watery little sigh, and he pushed the blade through her fingers. Pushed it home.

VIX

“Father!”

I heard the pounding of footsteps coming up through the gardens, and Annia’s voice calling.
“Father!”

I’m here
, I thought, and swallowed hard. She’d come back from Sabina’s villa sooner than I thought.

Annia came flying into the atrium and skidded to a halt, hair flying all about her. Just the sight of her made my heart squeeze. My daughter filled me with the sort of foolish urges that usually assail fathers with their first children, not their last. I’d missed so much of her life, and now I wanted to buy her jewelry, teach her how to form a proper fist, tell her to drop her hems lower because she kilted them far too short for my liking when she went running. Mostly I restrained myself, because in the eyes of the world Titus was her father, and he’d stay that way even if Annia knew I had sired her. Sabina and I made her, but we hadn’t raised her—and I wouldn’t encroach on that.

I rose, marshaling soothing words if she was angry, comforting words if she cried—but her eyes passed across me. “Where’s my father?”

Whatever Sabina had planned to say, she hadn’t said it. Part of me felt relieved at my reprieve.

Annia groaned. “They’re all at the theatre, why did I forget!” She dropped a string of curses that would have done any legionary proud. “We need to send a message to my father, he has to come
back
—or I need Marcus, oh, gods be damned, Marcus is with the Emperor at the villa—”

“What’s happened?” My daughter’s face was bone-white and deadly serious.

“Pedanius Fuscus,” she said, gripping my arm, and there was a spill of words. Pedanius and Sabina and Antinous, and something incoherent about a ring. “I didn’t want to leave Aunt Sabina, not alone with Pedanius—”

I didn’t understand her panic. “Sabina could flay that little pustule with a glance.”

“But she asked me about the ring from the man he said he killed, she said—”

“Besides,” I added. “She has guards. One guard, anyway.”

“Yes, and he’ll seize Pedanius, but the
ring
, she said to tell my father—”

Annia’s worry was starting to infect me. “Did you see Boil? A big Gaul—”

That was when Annia flung her head back and let out an earsplitting shriek. “
Would you shut up!
” she roared.
“Pedanius Fuscus murdered Antinous, and the Empress knows it!”

The silence after that was deafening.

“Antinous?” I whispered, my heart suddenly a crushed and frozen thing still trying to beat in my chest.

“Antinous,” Annia said. “I don’t know
why
, I don’t know anything, but Aunt Sabina does. She knows it all somehow. Because of the ring Marcus and I saw, the one Pedanius showed us when he boasted that he’d killed before.” Her hand tightened around my arm, only to jerk away a moment later. Because I was running, yelling for Titus’s grooms. “My horse!” I shouted, because it would get us there faster than a run on foot across the vineyards. I was in the saddle in an ungainly scramble, Annia flying up behind me, and I kicked the mare into a gallop before I felt her arms lock about my waist. We were flying along the road toward Sabina’s front gates, breath puffing cold on the winter air, and it still wasn’t fast enough for me.

“He’ll be in shackles by the time we get there,” Annia panted behind me, “you’ll see—” but I wasted no breath on words. Sabina’s front gates loomed, the rise of marble steps behind, and I came off the horse in a leap. I took the steps up into the villa four at a time, and the mangled place in my chest was trying to expand.
Antinous. Antinous.
My son, not dead of his own hand after all. Sabina had been right—he had been murdered. Just not by the hand we supposed.

My son’s name beat in me like a drum, until I came to the wide atrium where I’d spent so many quiet evenings with Sabina this past summer. We’d sat laughing in each other’s arms night after night, but I wasn’t laughing now. Because Boil lay on the step just outside, facedown in his Praetorian armor, one massive arm with its leather-capped stump outflung. His other fist was curled about the hilt of his
gladius
. He’d managed to do that much, before succumbing to the neat little stab wound down into the back of his neck.

“Dear gods,” Annia whispered.

Boil. Boil my second, Boil the last of my
contubernium
, dead on the mosaics with his eyes glazed over, but I was already springing across his still body. Up through the pillars of the atrium, seeing the pool, seeing the gray winter light through the open roof, and I saw her. My Sabina.

She was on her knees, slumped against the couch. Her sleek head was bowed and her hands pressed against her own breast. She wore the single garnet-and-silver earring that had been her gift to me and then mine back to her when I reclaimed her, and it trembled against her throat. Her blue silks gleamed sapphire in the light from the roof, except where they were stained by blood. Because she knelt in blood, a lake of blood, a sea of blood spreading on the mosaics around her. So much blood, a pulsing ribbon of it coursing dark and fast from under her hands, from her breast down the length of her slim trembling body to the floor.

She looked up, and I saw the stark whiteness of her face, her blue eyes gone blank and dizzy with pain. “Oh,” she breathed, and her hands fell away from the wound and reached for me, narrow hands painted scarlet, and I caught her before she fell into the lake of her own blood. I caught her and turned her against me, moving somehow even when my mind was one long howl.

It was Annia who howled, who flung herself forward reaching for her mother and shrieking like a fury. She looked like a fury, hair flying out around her like snakes, hands curled like claws, face stretched with a rage too great for curses, a rage I understood because I felt it too. But I’d ridden the crest of so much rage in my life, I knew how to shove it back to a place where it wouldn’t harm anyone until it was needed. I reached out and slapped Annia across the side of the head even as I was lowering Sabina to the floor.

Her roar cut off. She sat back on her heels in the blood, staring at me, tears springing to her eyes, and I was already snapping orders. “Get me cloth, curtains, anything, and then see if there’s a slave
anywhere
, a groom, a page—” Annia sprinted into the next room, leaving bloody footprints behind her, and I tore Sabina’s gown open to see the wound and she was trying to grip my hands in her blood-slippery ones.

“Pedanius—” she said, or I thought she was saying. Her voice was a thready blur. “Fuscus—”

“Breathe, don’t speak, just breathe—” Hell’s gates, so much blood! Her gown ran dark with it.
Not Sabina
, something in my head was screaming,
not my Empress
, but I had no time for screaming. She was clawing at my hands trying to get me to listen.

“Pedanius—”

“Pedanius Fuscus killed Antinous.” Annia’s voice, tear-clogged but swift as she crashed to her knees beside me with an armload of cloth, a huge heavy drape she’d ripped off a couch or a doorway. “We know he killed Antinous. We will tell the Emperor—”

“Hadrian—” Sabina was trying to swallow. Why couldn’t she swallow? The pulse in her throat was fast and light under my bloody hands, like a panicked bird’s.
“Hadrian—”

“We’ll tell him,” Annia said desperately. “Pedanius will never get away with it—”

“
Hadrian
,” Sabina was insisting. I could see her eyes wandering, fighting for focus. She was trying so hard, and I was swabbing at her breast with a fistful of clean cloth, trying to see the wound. “Not the lung,” I told her, “not the heart, either. Far too high—he missed—”

“Panicked,” Sabina said, the word coming so clear I could see it all. She lifted her hands and I saw slashes across her fingers—she’d fought him, maybe seized the blade, and she must have deflected the
gladius
over her breast rather than through it. The blade had gone through high, punching all the way through her back, and then he’d tried a second time and got her in the shoulder. Two wounds straight through, four places for blood to leave her body—

“Pedanius might have panicked and run, but he still thinks he killed her.” Annia’s voice tumbled. “How can he think he’ll get away with it, when he knows I saw him here? When the Emperor finds out—”

“
Hadrian
,” Sabina said again, and her whole body arched up against my arm in urgency.
“Villa.”
I looked into her pleading eyes, those blue eyes I knew so well.
“Another.”

“Someone’s already at the villa,” I guessed frantically, “trying for Hadrian? Another plotter?”

Sabina’s bloody fingertips fluttered against my chest with even more urgency.

“Today? Someone is there
now
?”

Her head drooped in a nod, and kept right on drooping.

“Who? Sabina,
who
?”

But Sabina couldn’t tell me that. Maybe she didn’t know or maybe she just couldn’t say it, because she was going from me, falling down the dark well, slipping away. “No,” I snarled, and I was wrapping her in cloth by the arm’s-length, strapping her wounds in layers, anything to close those four gaping holes in her body. She went limp against me, the bloodied silver of her earring swaying against my fingers. “No,” I breathed, “no, not you,
not you
—” Her eyes had fallen closed, but my wet scarlet fingers still found a rise and fall in her ravaged breast.