Lady of the Eternal City by Kate Quinn Page B

empress to join him first, so it might be as long as a month. He’s still reviewing legions in the south.”
    Mirah didn’t move. I focused on tying my sandals, adjusting my campaign tokens. I flung the battered lion skin across my shoulders, and I couldn’t help glancing up. She still sat in the middle of the bed, her russet hair tumbling down her naked back, her small capable hands linked around her drawn-up knees, looking at me. At once I became absorbed in readjusting the
gladius
at my side.
    “I don’t understand,” she said quietly. “I really don’t.”
    I shrugged. She looked at me a moment longer, and then she slid off the sleeping couch and back into her clothes. “I’ll be back tonight,” I said, feeling helpless and defensive, resentful and aching all at once. “I’m glad you like the rooms.”
    She gave me her little sideways smile as she tied up her hair. “I do like the rooms.”
    But she’d like them better if they were in Judaea.
    ANTINOUS
    “They’re staring,” Chaya whispered, peeking around Antinous’s hip. “Those men!”
    “Just ignore them, little monkey.” Antinous gave her hand a squeeze, smiling down at his sister. “Drunks at a wine shop will stare at anything.”
    “They only stare if
you
are along with us,” Dinah said, skipping on his other side.
    “Don’t be silly!” Antinous moved his sisters past the cluster of bleary-eyed drunks. Ex-legionaries by the look of them, with whores straddling their laps. He could hear a mutter as they passed—
Pretty, pretty; I’d ride that boy like a mule—
    Antinous raised his voice, deliberately loud. “Shall we go back, girls? I’ll help you unpack!” But he could still hear the mutters behind, and lip-smacking noises.
Pretty, pretty . . .
    Whenever Antinous saw his own face reflected in a bowl of water or his adopted mother’s small hand-glass, he stared at it in puzzlement. A face. The same face he’d always had. A straight nose; a chin just starting to prickle with a man’s beard; a mop of curly dark-blond hair. Just a face, and yet all his life it had made trouble. Other boys came at him fists raised because of that face, thinking that he was too pretty to know how to throw a punch (as if anyone raised by Vix would grow up not knowing how to fight!). Now that he was older, the other boys glared and accused Antinous of looking at their girls. Either way it meant he had no friends his own age. And strangers were no better. As long as Antinous could remember, he’d heard mutters when he passed by, just like the mutters from the wine shop. His very first clear memory was of a hard-faced woman in Germania, a neighbor who had taken him in when he was orphaned very young: “You’re a beauty, aren’t you?” Pinching his chin in sharp fingers. “Just like your mother. I can make a few coins off you someday.”
    Antinous couldn’t remember his mother—just a vague impression of honey-colored hair like his own. He wondered if her face had made problems for her, too. If the thing the world called beauty was always more trouble than it was worth.
    “Back already, Narcissus?” a voice hailed as Antinous and his sisters came round the corner. “I thought I told you to stay lost for the rest of the afternoon!”
    “The girls got bored.” Antinous smiled at the tall figure standing with one shoulder jammed against the lintel. His second clear memory from childhood was of that same granite-hard figure in battered armor, looming in the doorway of the woman in Germania. Those shoulders in their lion skin had blocked out the sun, and Antinous had thought he was looking at a god.
Maybe I was.
The only reason that hard-faced woman hadn’t made any money off Antinous or his face was that Vercingetorix the Red had tossed him over one shoulder and snarled, “He’s coming with me.”
    Dinah and Chaya released Antinous’s hands, flying to their father. Vix dropped a kiss on each dark head. “Inside. Your mother wants