by Kate Quinn
“Down to the edge of the vineyard!” Annia shouted. “Or it doesn’t count!”
She was already twisting vine leaves into a wreath for Fadilla’s hair—“A crown for our victor!”—by the time I pulled up at the stone wall at the hill’s bottom. “Race back?” she suggested, bouncing on her toes, and Fadilla clamored agreement under her wreath.
“Allow me some time to die.” It was a hot day for spring; I put my hands on my knees and bent over wheezing.
“You’re old,” Annia scoffed, stretching down to touch her toes.
“Not too old to lay you over my knee and beat you, girl.”
“You’d never catch me!” Dancing out of reach. “At least take off that lion skin, I don’t see how you can go slogging about in fur—”
I made a swipe for her flying red braid and missed. “I’m used to it.” My one token of Antinous—I slept under it even in the growing heat, and sometimes it gave me dreams of his golden hair. Don’t call me Narcissus . . .
I looked away from Titus’s daughters, hiding the bitterness that creased my eyes, and that was when I glanced over the wall marking the border of the vineyard. I’d never run all the way to the bottom, not this far. “I didn’t know there was another villa so close to yours.” Small but rambling; terraced gardens dropping down to a vineyard of its own that ran right along this one.
“The Empress’s villa,” Annia said. “She watches me go by on my morning run, if she’s there—I’ll generally run across our vineyard and hers.”
Fadilla bounced, waving a plump hand over her head. “There she is!”
I’d already spotted the distant figure in white, standing like a slim marble column on the terrace overlooking the gardens. It was too far away to see a face, to see anything distinguishing at all—but I still knew it was Sabina. I saw her arm rise, answering Fadilla’s wave. “I thought she stayed at the Emperor’s villa,” I heard myself saying.
“She comes here a good deal. Whenever the Emperor gets in a temper and tells her to stop nagging.” Annia snagged her little sister midbounce, replaiting Fadilla’s fraying braid. “They’re an odd pair. I used to think they hated each other, but sometimes I see them lock eyes and it’s like they’re reading each other’s minds.” Tying off the plait, she dropped a kiss on her sister’s head. “Shall we race back?”
“You two go,” I said, and swung over the wall and made my way toward the Empress of Rome.
She met me halfway, coming down through the terraced gardens. As she drew closer, I saw she was wearing one of the Egyptian-style sheaths she’d adopted in Alexandria, white linen tied between her breasts in some complicated knot that left her shoulders naked. Barefoot, bareheaded, coming to a halt before the orderly rows of vines. I halted too, wondering what she saw as her eyes traveled over me. Vercingetorix the Red, the man who had butchered Judaea? The brash ass of a boy who had once fought a duel to win her garnet earring? Or a grizzled legionary with gray-shot hair and a shoulder-load of bad dreams?
She smiled, crinkling the corners of her eyes, and I saw the girl I’d found in her father’s atrium, blinking up at me with those same blue eyes as her finger held her place in a scroll. “Hello,” she said.
I said just as simply, “Hello to you, my lady.”
* * *
We walked beside the rows of vines, and our words came slow and cautious. Bit like our aging selves, really. I had not seen her since our failed interrogation—what did we speak of, after a disappointment like that?
“I come here when I’m not required for Imperial functions,” she said, nodding out over her villa. “Or if Hadrian wants to be alone. More and more frequently, these days—he’s becoming a recluse.”
“So are you, by the looks of it.” Not so much as a page had approached the Empress out here with a dispatch or a visitor. Whenever I’d seen Sabina before, these months past, we had been insulated by marble and formality: her rank, Hadrian’s presence, slaves and hangers-on. This solitary silence wrapping the two of us away from the rest of the world was unsettling.
“I do live very quietly here,” Sabina said. “Just a few slaves and guards, and they know to keep their distance. I like it. I used to have an atrium crowded with petitioners, but the wives of dying emperors don’t have so many of those.”
I could not help asking. “You’ve not heard anything else, have you? From these informers of yours—if Lucius didn’t push Antinous, perhaps it could have been someone else?”
A mute shake of her head.
Of course not, I thought, and wondered what I was doing here, walking beside her.
She made a tilting motion of her shoulders as though sliding the matter of Lucius and our failed accusations away. “Titus tells me you live in the Esquiline.” Speaking lightly. “I thought you must be returning to your family in Judaea.”
I could say it now without feeling the prick in my eyes. “I have no family anymore.”
A breath came beside me, but she didn’t ask. I knew she wouldn’t. Vibia Sabina, soul of tact. I told her anyway.
“My girls, married and gone. My wife, dead.”
“I am sorry,” she said quietly.
Another silence. She turned away into the vineyard, trailing between the vines to give me time to swallow my sadness, and I was grateful. A hawk winged overhead through the sunshine, and Sabina arched her neck to follow its flight.
“This is where Annia runs when she comes cutting through.” Sabina looked at me over her shoulder, a white shape moving down the orderly rows, bare toes curling into the earth. I followed the Empress into the vines, running my hand over the first tight buds of the unripe grapes to stop myself from tracking the sway of Sabina’s hips through sunlit linen. Those Egyptian shifts didn’t really hide anything. I remembered how she had slithered catlike under Lucius Ceionius, purring in his ear as she threatened his life and his balls.
I cleared my throat. “Yes, Annia’s a fast one. And fierce.”
“Very.” Sabina glanced over her shoulder at me, her gaze guarded. She’d lined her eyes in crushed lapis, and they looked enormous. “My sister tells me you’ve grown fond of her.”
“Of her and her sister both.” Though it was no real secret Annia was my favorite. “Maybe it’s because of my own daughters. I miss them, but at the same time . . .”
Sabina turned to face me. “What?”
I halted in the middle of the vineyard, staring down the row. “They’re better without me. I was a piss-poor father, and I ruined them, and Antinous too. Everything that comes from me—anything that isn’t blood and death, because those are the only things I’m good at—everything that comes from me gets ruined. Including all my children.”
A slow, silent breath from Sabina. “That’s—not—true,” she said slowly.
I gave a bitter little laugh. “Yes, it is.”
Her eyes lowered, then lifted back up. She took a breath. “It’s time I told you something.”
“What?”
She didn’t answer at once. The sun beat down, and I could feel a trickle of sweat making its way down my back under the heat of Antinous’s lion skin. She looked at me with her lapis-blue, lapis-lined eyes. “I don’t know how to begin, exactly.”
I raised my eyebrows.
She drew a gulp of a breath. “It’s Annia. She’s not Titus and Faustina’s daughter.”
I stared.
“She’s ours.”
Somewhere behind me, a bird exploded into the sky with a buffet of wings. “Ours?” I repeated dumbly, and my voice came out in a whisper.
“Yours.” Sabina rested her fingertips against my chest in supplication. “And mine.”
* * *
I could hear her voice explaining, the words spilling like they’d been upended from a jug corked for nearly twenty years. Explaining a deception wrought, a secret kept from the Emperor and the whole world—but
it was all happening somewhere distant, the words coming fogged and half-heard to my ears.
I had another daughter.
Annia of the red braid and the ferocious scowl and the long, long limbs. Annia Galeria Faustina . . .
“Mine,” I whispered, “Mine—” There was no disbelief. The truth of it called to me in Annia herself, her freckles and her temper and her restless energy just like mine. The truth had called me from the day I met her, a savage little girl of seven cuffing blood off her lip and telling me she never cried. I’d loved what she was right then and there, and I loved the fleet young huntress she’d become who had been able to make a heartsick old soldier laugh.
My daughter, I thought again, utterly stuck on that one precious, incredible thing. Somehow I was on my knees between the vines, gasping like I’d run a mile. The world swirled around me; sights, sounds, scents, so bright and beautiful when everything had been so gray and meaningless—
“Vix—” Sabina went to her knees too, seizing my hands, and her eyes were full of tears. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” My heart and mind all whirling. “Sorry—why?”
She bowed her shorn head, narrow fingers wrapping mine tight. “Sorry I never told you.”
Time was I’d have flung that apology right back in her face. Hated her for keeping yet more secrets, just as she’d kept Antinous’s love for Hadrian a secret. But what kind of secret-keeper had I ever been? The day I found Antinous with Hadrian, I flung the secret of Sabina’s long love for me in the Emperor’s face. What if I’d done even worse? What if I’d thrown Annia at Hadrian too? Would I have burned my youngest daughter’s life up in an emperor’s rage, just to hurt her mother, if I had known the truth?
I don’t know.
I don’t know, and I’m glad I never will know. Because there would be no way in this world or the next to make that right.
My hands tightened on Sabina’s until I could feel her rings pressing my skin. “You were right not to tell me.”
She laughed a little through the tears in her blue eyes. Blue to my gray—that was where Annia got the sword-steel flash in her gaze; in the combination of our eyes. The thought gave me exquisite pleasure. “It feels good to tell you.”
I’d have been half an empire away once Sabina realized I’d left a child in her belly. I was off rounding up Hadrian’s enemies for him as she shouldered everything alone. “Why didn’t you wash her out of you with some potion?” My voice was hoarse. “Hadrian’s temper back then, he would have killed you if he found out. It would have been safer.”
“Even when she was just a flutter inside me, I loved her,” Sabina said. “Because she is ours.”
My carefully hoarded numbness shattered all around me. My forehead dropped against Sabina’s shoulder, and I trembled all over as the world rushed at me, full of light and sound and color again. Different from the brief surge of life I’d felt when hunting for my son’s killer, because that surge of life had come on a red tide of rage. This—this was rebirth. I smelled rich earth and budding grapes, leaves and sunlight and the must of wine still contained on the stem. The tears that sprang to my eyes were a balm, sweet joy and sweet relief. That black certainty that everyone I touched was doomed—
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 a
s 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.”
CHAPTER 19
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.
