by Kate Quinn
“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.
The villa could have fallen down around me and I wouldn’t have heard. I ripped at the pile of cloth for more bandages, striking Annia away as she reached to help me. “Warn Hadrian,” I rapped out. “He has to be warned, he could be killed at any moment—”
“But Pedanius is finished. Even if he has a guard or slave bribed to kill the Emperor, we’ll know he was the one who—”
“He doesn’t know that!” I lifted Sabina’s limp form. The floor looked like a butcher’s yard. “You’re the only one who knows, and he thinks you’re a stupid girl who can be dealt with later. He didn’t know you’d come find me. If his man at the villa isn’t stopped, the Emperor dies.”
Hadrian, Sabina had whispered. Hadrian. Maybe the last word I’d ever hear on her lips, and I had a spasm of hatred for the Emperor. He got everything, maybe even the last moment of Sabina’s life.
But if Hadrian died, God only knew what would happen. That bitter old bastard was all we had, the wall holding out the bloodshed like those white walls he built in Britannia to keep out the chaos.
“He’ll never believe me,” Annia was arguing, her voice rising in blind panic. “I’m just a child to him, you should be the one to warn him—”
“Do you know how to bind a sword wound?” I shouted. “I stay with your mother!”
Annia didn’t even hear my slip of the tongue. She was shouting over me, “But the Emperor won’t listen to a word out of my mouth! If I had my father, if I had Marcus—” That was when my daughter stopped, blood draining from her face. “Oh gods, Marcus is with him. He went to give the Emperor his report as Prefect of the City—”
“Then he might die too.” I had Sabina in one arm, but I managed to unbuckle my sheathed gladius and slap it hilt-first into Annia’s hand. “Take this, get on my horse, and carry warning to the Emperor. Make him hear you.”
“Vix—” Annia took a step toward me, clutching my sword. A girl, just a girl in a blue dress, wide-eyed and bloody-kneed and so young. My daughter.
I rose fast and hard, so fast she recoiled from me. “Annia,” I roared, and her eyes flickered over the blood on my hands, the body lying limp at my feet. “Annia, run!”
And Annia runs. So fast, just a streak of blue fading away from me, and I wonder, Can she outrun death? Because if she can’t, if she fails to carry the warning in time, an empire falls. You’d think the fate of the Eternal City would depend on someone like me, a warrior with bloody hands and a bloody sword. But it will rise or fall on a woman—and maybe it always does.
There are hoofbeats outside, and then I am alone. Alone with the woman I have loved all my life, more than my life. More than Rome, and she is white and waxen and slipping away from me. “Sabina,” I whisper, going to my knees in her blood and tearing at her bandages again. “Hell’s gates, do not leave me now.”
ANNIA
Eighteen miles, Annia thought as she flew down the steps in her bare, bloodstained feet. Eighteen miles to the Emperor’s villa. An hour’s ride at a gallop—surely no more— She hauled herself into the saddle, slung Vix’s gladius across her back, and banged her heels into the mare.
She nearly fell off on the first lunging stride, clinging to handfuls of mane as the horse bolted down the road. Dear gods, why had she never learned to ride a horse? Because girls of good birth didn’t ride horses, they rode in litters or in covered palanquins with cushions, but why hadn’t she learned anyway? She’d never before been stopped from doing things just because they weren’t done. But she’d always preferred her own two feet to take her anywhere she wanted to go, not four hooves that bounced and jolted and sent her teeth crashing together with every rattling stride—
She reached the road, hooves ringing on stone rather than dirt. Eighteen miles down the road to the Emperor’s villa outside Tibur. Just eighteen miles.
Marcus, she thought. Marcus who smelled of linen and ink, of wax for writing tablets and the mint he liked to chew. He’d have begun this morning with a mint infusion, worrying over his diction and his declamation as he went to make his report to the Emperor, never dreaming that the afternoon would bring horror and conspiracy and a lake of blood. Just as Annia had begun the morning with a lighthearted dash across the vineyard because her Imperial aunt wished to speak with her.
Whoever Pedanius had poised to strike at the Emperor—would they kill Marcus, too? She could see him lying limp like Empress Sabina, face gray-white as this winter sky, eyes glazed and dead—
No. Annia flung the word at the Fates like a spear. No one would die today. Not Marcus, not the Emperor, not even Aunt Sabina lying so pale and blood-spent on the floor. Vix would fight off Charon the Ferryman himself if he came in his long black barge for the Empress, and Annia would save Marcus and Emperor Hadrian both.
Marcus.
No. Don’t think of him. Just the road ahead.
Marcus—
No. Road.
It was the road that brought her down. A rut between the stones that caught the mare’s hoof and sent her stumbling to her knees. Annia went flying as though she’d been fired from a bow. She was rolling as soon as she hit the ground, gasping with pain and gasping for breath. Please, she prayed, staggering to her feet and clutching for the gladius before it could slide from its scabbard, please let the mare not be lamed! And that was the prayer the gods decided to answer, because the mare most definitely wasn’t lamed; the mare had recovered her balance, veered off the road, and was now galloping across a field of weeds. Annia shouted, but the mare was headed for her stables or for Rome or for damned Carthage for all Annia knew, and she was going there far faster than even Annia could run. One f
lip of the tail and the mare disappeared into a line of scraggly trees.
And Annia looked all around her.
The winter road was utterly empty. Not a way station in sight—and there wouldn’t be one for twenty miles at least, because she remembered Marcus droning on about road systems and how each traveling station was spaced precisely a day’s journey apart. Not a farmhouse or a shack to be seen. Nothing at all, perhaps, between her and the Emperor’s villa but twelve miles of road. According to the mile markers, she had come only a third of the way.
She looked down at her bare feet. Long, strong, capable feet. Muddy, still splashed with the Empress’s dried blood. She stretched them, going up to her toes slowly and back down. “Twelve miles,” she said aloud. “Just my daily run.”
Three times over.
She shook her hair out of her eyes and began to run.
SABINA
Save me.
When Sabina was a child, she’d suffered from fits of epilepsia. “Like Julius Caesar,” her father had said, trying to cheer her, “so you see you’re in good company.” But the fits had not felt like a blessing. Her head would clamp, and her vision would shatter into a thousand pieces, and before the fog descended and her father tried to cushion her fall, she would have time for a silent cry of Save me!
She had been stabbed through the breast. She remembered the blade going through her, very clearly—but this still felt more like a fit of epilepsia than a wound. The shattering of consciousness, the fog claiming her mind and her vision, the dimly felt panic as loving hands cushioned her.
Save me.
Someone had saved her—Sabina remembered that. She had not had a fit of epilepsia since she was twelve; she’d been cured by that oldest of remedies, a gladiator’s blood painted on her lips and on her temples. Vix’s blood, a boy gladiator freshly wounded from his first bout. Even when they were children, the Fates had tied their lives together. Vix had saved her.
Save me now, my love.
