Lady of the Eternal City Read Free

unsatisfactory daughter-in-law who’d taken her place as Empress of Rome.
    “You may be Empress, my girl.” Plotina lowered her voice, but guards like me always have an excuse to hover. “But only because I made Dear Publius Emperor. Remember that. He certainly will.”
    “Of course, because we all know he’s just aching to see you again.” Sabina tossed her scroll aside, swinging out of the curtained litter. “How many letters did my husband write you while he was away, for all those long screeds of advice you sent him every other day?”
    A sniff from the old Empress, and then we all took our places. I held my post at Sabina’s elbow, watching a drop of sweat ease down the long ribbon of her neck from under her plaited wig. She’d never been a woman to fuss with her hair; she’d shorn it clean off at some point so it covered her head in a silky cap of light brown. But she was Empress now, so someone had jammed a wig over that shocking shorn head. Probably Empress Plotina, who waited with her whole body quivering like a horse at the starting line of the Circus Maximus. Her eyes gleamed fever-bright as she remarked to the air, “Dear Publius keeps us waiting, but that is a god’s prerogative. He is a god incarnate, you know.”
    “Have you been inhaling too much of that Imperial purple dye?” Sabina asked conversationally. “Sometimes I wonder.”
    I almost laughed, but then the cry went up.
    “He comes!”
    I looked beyond the gates to see dust, billowing like a storm cloud on the road approaching the city. A great roar went up from the waiting crowd, and Sabina spoke softly. “Are they so eager to see him?”
    “They want the largesse they’ll get if they cheer, Lady.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I made a formal announcement that they’d get largesse if they cheered.”
    Sabina smiled, her Imperial mask cracking briefly to show the girl who had cantered around the Empire in search of adventure. It was hard not to smile at that girl, even if you sometimes wanted to put a leash on her.
    She studied me a moment, and her serious expression returned. “What’s wrong, Vix? You’re smiling, but you’ve been coiled tight as a rope all morning. Are you dreading something? Besides
that
,” she added with a glance at the approaching storm of dust that was her husband.
    I’m dreading a death
, I almost said. Five executions were coming, but one would be worse than all the others combined. I’d dreaded it during this whole past year like a leaden weight in my stomach. And it was coming, once this rose-petaled pomp was done. The Emperor had ordered those deaths, and just because he’d changed his mind after the arrests were made—“Leave them alive in their cells till I return,” he’d written me, “I will see the executions myself”—didn’t mean blood wasn’t still going to be spilled.
    Empress Sabina knew whose death I dreaded. She dreaded it, too. I saw her hesitate as though hunting for words, but then the trumpets blared, and she remembered to ignore me. I had a moment to resent that, even over the sick swoop in my stomach, but she was right to do it. We were safer that way, both of us. We turned away from each other at the same instant—immaculate Empress, stone-visaged guard; nothing but cool, impersonal space between us—to face the Emperor.
    Publius Aelius Hadrian.
    He cut a splendid image, I won’t deny that. Broad-shouldered, tall, sitting his big stallion like a centaur, red leather reins doubled through his tanned fist. Bearded like a Greek, in disdain for all the long tradition this city had for shorn chins. He’d worn military dress: a cloak of rich purple draped with careless flair across the horse’s flanks, a breastplate polished to a meticulous gleam that brought a chuff of approval out of me despite myself. Hadrian’s head was bare, the morning breeze stirring his curls, and though that massive handsome head was bowed with a humility designed to please the crowd, I