Lady of the Eternal City

by Kate Quinn

  “And you chose that?”

  “Ceionia Fabia helped . . .” Ceionia always looked perfect, after all: a luscious little thing with her smooth hair and dimples, and she had condescended to lend Annia her expertise. “A girl with red hair must wear nothing but green. This shade, something pale. Girls our age must wear pale colors, or we look vulgar. And you have such a long face, you must balance it with curls on either side.” Ceionia patted her own hair, smoothed into a knot with just one curl dropping over her shoulder. “Goodness, our first party at the Emperor’s villa! My father says my little brother and I must be the picture of poise; he says the Emperor has quite the surprise planned for our family . . .”

  Annia didn’t care what the Emperor planned. She only wanted to waylay Marcus and see if any of what Vercingetorix had said could possibly be true.

  “I think Annia looks lovely,” her mother said loyally. “She’d look beautiful in anything.”

  “Faustina, you’re a wonderful mother but a terrible liar,” the Empress of Rome retorted. “That sickly green makes Annia look like a month-old corpse, and if Ceionia sold her on it, then she’s a clever little tart who was trying to eliminate the competition.”

  Should have known I’d get it wrong, Annia thought dismally. She’d always prided herself on being a Spartan sort of girl, all steel and gravitas—it was embarrassing how much she simply wanted to look pretty, but the thought was there anyway. I want to be pretty for once. I want Marcus to look at me.

  Her Imperial aunt must have caught her expression, because she did a swift evaluation of the bustle behind her. The slaves were still dashing about with garlands of ivy and roses for the Emperor’s vast outdoor banquet; the festivities wouldn’t begin for the better part of an hour. “There’s time,” the Empress decided, and crooked a finger at her niece. “Come with me.”

  Annia found herself whisked into a sumptuous windowed series of chambers that could only be the Empress’s private apartments. “My mother said that at my age, I really should know how to choose my own attire. But I don’t know how.”

  “The trouble with your mother, may all the gods bless her, is that she looks marvelous in absolutely anything. So it never matters what she wears.” Aunt Sabina surveyed Annia with a critical eye. “Those like you and me with less in the way of raw goddesslike beauty must work a little harder.”

  “But you’re beautiful too.” Her Imperial aunt had a midnight-blue gown embroidered with silver stars, and more stars strung about her neck and her hair and her ankles on loops of silver wire. She looked like a night sky and about as all-knowing.

  “What a nice thing to hear, and at my age, too.” Aunt Sabina smiled. “But I assure you, it’s all illusion. You’ll learn to cast one, too. Ceionia has good cause to be jealous of you, if you only use what you have.”

  “Definitely not green,” a tall African slave girl said, wrinkling her dark nose.

  “No. That flame-colored silk I had as a present from the merchants in Alexandria . . .”

  Annia felt herself whirled and stripped, pinned and discussed. “The gold sandals lacing up the shins? And gold bracelets, delicate ones, and a belt of gold cord—”

  “I feel like a slave getting oiled up for the auction block,” she complained, and Aunt Sabina’s painted eyes held hers.

  “That is what an empress feels like at times, my dear.”

  “Really?” She cocked her head. Aunt Sabina with her oceans of poise and endless elegance?

  “Oh, yes.” Her aunt sat Annia down on a carved ivory stool and with her own hands started to comb out the horrible ringlets. “Because an empress really is like a slave at an auction block—she stands there as crowds of people ogle her, and she stares over their heads with a fixed expression. An empress’s appearance is an Imperial duty. But you, on the other hand, wish to look beautiful tonight for a rather more personal reason, I think?”

  Annia felt herself blushing, thinking of Vercingetorix the Red’s blunt words about boys of Marcus’s age. “Good girls like you they can’t touch. So your friend Marcus stays away.” Annia didn’t quite share his certainty, and before she could really summon the courage to ask him again, he’d moved on from their villa. Besides, you couldn’t really go up to a hero of Rome, to a man, and ask—

  “What do you wear if you want to make someone seduce you?” Annia blurted out. And immediately wanted to die.

  One of the slave girls lifted a hand to smother a giggle, but Aunt Sabina just looked thoughtful. “That depends,” she said. “Do you actually want to be seduced, or are you just hoping to raise the notion in his mind? Actual seduction is going to be rather difficult to achieve at a banquet this crowded.”

  Annia felt herself going scarlet. “Just—raising the notion,” she whispered. Dear gods, let Aunt Sabina not ask who.

  And she didn’t. Annia’s mother would have at least smiled knowingly, and her sister Fadilla would have clapped her hands and started reeling off names, but Aunt Sabina just fetched a little pot from one of the slave girls and sprinkled a pinch of something over Annia’s loosened hair, wavy from the ringlets but no longer bunched on either side of her face. “A combing of gold dust through your hair to make it gleam, I think,” she murmured. “And a pinch massaged into the skin . . . You’ll glimmer under the light, and no one will quite know why, but they’ll be drawn to you.” Pushing Annia straight when she strained for a glimpse in the glass. “Not yet, you aren’t finished.”

  “Like a roast?” Annia muttered, still feeling her cheeks flame, but she was starting to get interested in the process despite herself. Finally Aunt Sabina tugged her to her feet, gesturing the maids to hold up a glass.

  Annia stared at herself. “I don’t look—proper.”

  “I thought you wanted to raise thoughts of seduction, not propriety,” Aunt Sabina pointed out. “And really, you aren’t showing any more flesh than prim little Ceionia.”

  “But . . .” Fiery orange-red silk sluicing down her body, a webwork of gold covering her ankles and her bare arms, gold dust making a faint gleam at her eyelids and the hollows of her collarbone. Maybe it was too much. “I look like an eastern—something-or-other,” Annia fumbled. “Not like a Roman girl should. They’ll call me a harlot.”

  “Let me tell you something, Annia Galeria Faustina.” Aunt Sabina tugged a strand of gold-dusted hair over Annia’s shoulder. “Don’t waste yourself worrying what the proper Roman girls say, because you will never look like them. You look better—a fire nymph and an Amazon rolled into one, and they know it. Maybe it’s all that running you’ve done, but you don’t mince when you enter a room, you swagger. So put those splendid shoulders back and swagger into that atrium like the goddess you are, and if anyone flings the word harlot at you, crush it under your heel like the nonsense it is. Because there is no man in Rome who would not choose you over boring little Ceionia and her properly folded hands.”

  Aunt Sabina looked quite fierce suddenly, but did she have tears in her eyes? “Did they call you names when you were my age?” Annia found herself asking.

  “My predecessor Empress Plotina loved to call me a whore,” Aunt Sabina said, and the shine in her eyes must have been a trick of the lamplight because now she had her usual expression of faint amusement. “But I never paid such barbs any attention, nor should you. So why don’t you be just a little scandalous and loop the end of your skirt up over one arm to show a flash of ankle? They’re splendid ankles; you should show them off.”

  Annia was beginning to smile. “That will make Servianus hiss.”

  Aunt Sabina tugged the gold-embroidered hem a little higher. “Good.”

  * * *

  The atrium with its rose-garlanded pillars was mostly filled with muttering senators clustered like hens, taking sidelong glances at the Emperor where he sat looking drawn and irritable in a gold chair, fingers drumming. “His heir,” Servianus was saying, “he must ann
ounce an heir soon, his health . . .” And whenever anyone spoke of the Emperor’s health the whispers faded off into even more inaudible mumbles. Servianus was too preoccupied to notice Annia or her ankles, but as Annia stood looking about for her parents—all right, looking for Marcus—her gaze swept right across Pedanius Fuscus, standing with a cup of wine in hand, and his gaze was going up and down her body and then back again. He didn’t look that hungry when he was trying to rape me, Annia thought, and a spasm of disgust went through her, coiled around with fear. She stamped down both, putting up her chin. I’ll die screaming before I show you one drop of terror.

  He crossed the mosaics: a handsome young man in a fine synthesis, but somehow not quite the golden boy of Rome anymore. He’d changed since that beating he’d taken. He looked twitchy now instead of confident, eyes sliding off to the side instead of resting firm during a conversation, his smile nervous instead of charming . . . And of course, as soon as he opened his mouth to speak, his new lisping splutter sealed the whole dismal impression. Those teeth—Annia wanted to beam whenever she saw those gapped and broken-off teeth that turned every word he said into a hissing mess.

  “Brine-Faith,” she greeted him, mimicking his lisp with a lift of her eyebrows.

  “You look like a whore.” His eyes slid over her again.

  Maybe it was just because Aunt Sabina had been called a whore in her day too, but Annia threw her head back and laughed. Real laughter—the spasm of fear in her stomach was utterly gone. “And you look like an idiot,” she returned. “But you are an idiot, and we both know I’m not a whore.”

  She patted his cheek and moved off, partly to irritate him and partly because she’d just seen Marcus—lean and serious in his own perfectly pleated synthesis, standing at the Emperor’s elbow. One of Hadrian’s quizzing sessions, probably, where he fired question after question at Marcus as though looking for chinks in his defenses . . . Annia didn’t know if it was the gold dust and flame silk that made her confident, but she slid through the crowd and came right up to Marcus’s elbow. “—no power over what the Fates put in our path,” he was saying in response to some question of the Emperor’s. “But a man does have power over his own mind, and in the end—” He saw Annia and stopped a moment, and her heart fluttered in her chest, but his face never moved even as his eyes traveled her whole flame-wrapped length. “Control over the Fates is impossible,” he said, turning back to the Emperor. “So control over the mind is the best man can hope for.”

  “Well put,” Hadrian said, and turned a moment as a steward tugged at his sleeve with a murmur. Marcus gave a little bow, still ignoring Annia, and she narrowed her eyes. I will get a reaction out of you if it kills me, Marcus Catilius Severus.

  She made her own curtsy to the distracted Emperor, looking for a way to slide out of the crowd with Marcus, but some senatorial colleague of her father’s spoke up—“Titus Aurelius’s daughter, isn’t it? The one who runs like a little wood nymph”—and that provoked the kind of slightly derisive laughter that gritted Annia’s teeth. Servianus shook his head nearby.

  “A disgrace,” he said, eyes fastened disapprovingly on Annia’s ankles. “Your father is far too indulgent. Girls of good birth should spend their days learning to manage a household! If this is how the daughters of Rome fill their hours—”

  “On the contrary,” Emperor Hadrian said, and Annia’s eyes flew to him in surprise. He was surveying her too, not with Marcus’s expressionlessness or Pedanius’s hunger, but with a sort of objective approval. “The women of Sparta ran races to prove their fitness as the bearers of strong sons. The fleetest were prized as wives and mothers alike. Was that such a disgrace?”

  “Sparta is not Rome, Caesar.”

  “And Rome has always looked to the glories of Greece for improvement. Why not in the standards of our womanhood? I do not see disgrace here.” Hadrian leveled a finger at Annia. “I see a future mother of warriors.”

  Annia bobbed another curtsy. “Caesar,” she managed to say, but felt pride in her like a warm bubble as Servianus’s chin jerked. Take that, you old goat.

  “That reminds me,” the Emperor murmured, his gaze sliding past Annia again. “I must speak with your father about you—if the steward will fetch him . . .”

  Annia seized on his nod of dismissal, sliding her fingers through Marcus’s elbow. “Come with me,” she whispered, and stalked (swaggered, Aunt Sabina said she swaggered—did she?) out through the pillars of the atrium to the cool autumn night.

  The air in the gardens was dark and lemon-scented from the numberless trees. Annia could see peacocks wandering, and more guests, but she didn’t pay attention. She just led Marcus around a dark hedge until she couldn’t see anyone, and then she turned and arched her back a little in that catlike way she’d seen the Empress do, feeling bold and reckless and altogether heady.

  “So,” she said without preamble. “You don’t have to marry me.”

  He started. “What?”

  “You’ve been saying you were going to marry me as long as I can remember, but you’ve evidently changed your mind in the past year. Since you’re the honorable sort who wouldn’t break your word”—Annia forced herself to shrug—“I release you.”

  Marcus’s mouth opened and closed for a moment. “I can’t talk about such a matter with you,” he said finally. “One talks about marriage with a girl’s father, not the girl herself.”

  “And now you don’t have to talk with my father,” Annia said. “Never will. Free at last.”

  “We shouldn’t be alone like this together, either,” he went on, eyeing her. “It’s not suitable.”

  “What, the dress isn’t suitable?”

  “Well, you could drop the hem. I can see all the way up to your ankles.”

  “Empress Sabina says I have lovely ankles.”

  “You do,” he bit off.

  “Brine-Face said I looked like a whore.” Annia took a step closer, her heart thrumming. “What do you think?”

  His face changed. “Pedanius said what?”

  A shrug.

  “He needs another lesson.” Marcus’s voice was clipped.

  “What do you mean, a lesson?”

  “We should go back inside.”

  “So go,” she challenged. “You don’t owe me anything anymore, Marcus.”

  He didn’t move. “You think I don’t want to marry you?”

  “You haven’t spoken two words to me since you put on that toga! What was I supposed to think?”

  He started to turn away. “I’m taking you back to your mother.”

  “No,” said Annia, and she reached out and dragged his head down and kissed him. The first time she’d kissed him—at twelve, over a curse tablet—she’d mostly gotten his nose. This time her teeth scored his lip as their mouths clashed. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see blood by the time they pulled apart. His hands had found her waist, heating her skin through the silk, they were both trembling like leaves, and Annia’s blood roared so loud in her own ears she could hardly hear her own voice.

  “I don’t care what your precious Stoics say,” she told him shakily. “Perfect control is boring.”

  “You think I have any control at all?” His hands made fists in the silk at her back, and he yanked her against him. Annia felt the prickles of the hedge on one side, the movement of the night breeze on the other, but Marcus was long and warm and hard against the whole length of her, and he was growling something into her hair.

  “I’ll tell you how much control I have, Annia Galeria Faustina. I got so angry that day we went to the games—”

  “I know you did, I—”

  “Shut up!” He gave her a little shake that somehow wrenched her onto her toes and closer up against him. “Not at you. At Pedanius Fuscus, because just the sight of him in the Colosseum made you so bitter and helpless. I went home early, and I counted all the
money I had, and it wasn’t enough. So I sold my two slaves—I never touched them, and I never will because I sold them away, and the day after my manhood ceremony I went out and I hired thugs. The expensive kind who won’t get drunk and botch the job. And I hired them to beat Pedanius Fuscus to a pulp.”

  “Marcus—”

  “I told them to spoil his looks.” The words kept tumbling. “Because it’s what he had, that golden confidence and the looks and the birth to go with it. That’s what made people think he was a young emperor in the making. I told them to spoil his looks, take his confidence, because I thought maybe it would be enough to stop him from becoming Emperor. Hadrian’s as vain as Venus, he’d never choose a successor who looks ridiculous. An heir who can’t give a speech at the Rostra without lisping and spluttering? People would laugh. Hadrian’s too full of pride to pick an heir people would laugh at. At least I hope he is, because I fear for you if Pedanius Fuscus ever becomes Caesar. He hurt you once, and if he’s emperor no one will be able to stop him from doing it again. So I stopped him first.”

  Annia’s throat was thick. She could hardly see Marcus’s face through the melting shadows; she didn’t know if he looked grim or exultant or despairing. For me. She reached up and touched his cheek, fresh-shaven and smelling of bath oil and the dye that edged his synthesis. For me.

  “You probably despise me because I should have beaten him up myself,” Marcus finished in a rush. “You would have done it yourself if you were a man. Well, I wanted to. I wasn’t even afraid to try. But I didn’t want to just try. I had to be sure—and I didn’t know if I could do it, with him so much bigger and more vicious. In the end, it was more important that he be put down, no matter who did it.

  “So, if you want to know how much Stoic control I have,” he finished, “I’ll say it. None. I couldn’t stop thinking about Pedanius Fuscus till I’d put him in his bed with four broken ribs and a broken nose and all his teeth smashed in. And I can’t stop thinking about you at all. I can’t be around you at all. Just the smell of your hair, and I want to drag you off behind a hedge.”