Lady of the Eternal City Read Free Page A

saw the excitement that danced in his deep-set eyes. I felt my pulse give an answering leap of loathing.
    It was afternoon before the interminable sacrifices and blessings were complete. My stomach growled and my eyes stung from temple smoke by the time Hadrian swept like a conqueror into the Domus Flavia, sandals slapping against the intricate mosaics. The roaring of the crowds retreated to distant thunder beyond the marble colonnades as Hadrian unfastened his cloak from his breastplate. A slave came forward, but Hadrian looked about him instead and tossed the cloak at me. It fell to the floor at my feet.
    Our eyes met for the first time in a year, the first time since Emperor Trajan had died and Hadrian had taken his place. The Emperor and I locked eyes, and I swear I saw a flare of hatred in Hadrian’s gaze to match the jump in my heart. I’d felt that same flare the day we first met. Back then I was just a freed slave with a swagger and a chest full of scars; he was a drawling bore with a snow-white toga and a string of senatorial titles. The gulf between two men like that should be wider than the whole Empire, but we put each other’s hackles up the moment we met. We’d circled each other, measured each other through narrowed eyes, and I suppose I could be portentous and say that I knew at once how much he would come to blight my life. But I’m about as prescient as a paving stone, and I’d had no idea at the time. I just knew that I hated him on sight, and he felt the same for me. It’s just like falling in love, that kind of hatred. It feels the same, that sick swoop in your stomach, but it’s all poisoned and upside down.
    He pointed to the purple cloak at my feet. “Pick that up.”
    I didn’t move. He’d schemed his way into Imperial purple, and then—for some perverse reason I had yet to understand—he’d made me his watchdog. I’d laughed in his face, but how do you say no to an emperor when he can squash you like a fly? Not just you, but the two daughters you dote on, the adopted son you probably shouldn’t admit is your favorite, and the stalwart, beloved wife who raised all three? I had a whole set of hostages for my good behavior, and the Emperor knew it.
    “Caesar,” I said, and stooped to pick up the damned cloak.
    “Excellent,” he said pleasantly. “Now, why don’t you go fetch our friends? You know the ones I mean. I’ve a little time to spare before I prepare for the meeting with the Arvals.”
    The Domus Flavia was a lovely place: marble colonnades catching every breeze, wet green gardens with splashing fountains, cool mosaic tiles set in rippling patterns underfoot. But it was a palace—it had housed great men like Emperor Trajan, but it had housed monsters and madmen too. And monsters and madmen require uglier things in their palaces. Things like dungeon cells.
    I let my centurions fetch the other prisoners, but I went for Titus myself—I owed him that, at least. I’d put my old friend in the best cell I could find and softened it up with a yielding bed, good meals, water for washing, even a store of books. But a cell is a cell, and when my friend lifted his head and looked at me, the changes I saw from his months of dwelling in this place shook me. He’d been a lanky, cheerful young patrician with a string of distinguished names and a lineage that went back to Aeneas. Now I saw the shadows under his eyes, the flesh that had fallen away from his body, the gray salting his hair.
    How could Titus have gray in his hair already? He was even younger than I.
    “Hello, Slight,” he said, and I couldn’t help wincing at his old name for me. Vercingetorix was too foreign a name for Roman tongues; it had long been shortened to the casual Gallic “Vix”—which just happened to double in Latin as a common adjective, something along the lines of “barely” or “slightly.” I’d have belted anyone else who dared call me
slightly
anything, but Titus was allowed. I’d saved his