Diana stepped back, chewing absently on a piece of straw. “Who’s driving, Xerxes?”
“A Greek boy. Won a few races at the Circus Flaminius. Got good hands.”
“The bays run too?” More than one team of horses could run for each color faction.
“Aye. Under Tarquin.”
“He’ll win, if those buggardly Blues don’t foul him.”
“Diana!” Marcella broke into the litany. Uninterrupted, Diana would go on all day. “Cornelia sent me down for you. She’s going mad trying to make everything perfect.”
“Go on with her, Lady,” Xerxes grunted at Diana. “Take your pretty sandals out of the muck.”
Diana came forward, catching one of the gray stallions by the nose and dragging his head down. Her arms looked too slim to hold a big horse, but the stallion’s broad nose dropped under her hand, and the baleful gaze was caught by a pair of cloudy blue-green eyes that had half the men in Rome stammering like schoolboys. “Keep steady out there,” Diana told the horse. “It’s a wild time once the flag drops.”
The stallion chuffed against her hand, scarlet ribbons fluttering in his braided mane just like the red ribbons plaited into Diana’s hair. Marcella tugged at her elbow again, and the grooms ran forward with the red-dyed harness. Behind stood the racing chariot, slung light between two gilded wheels, crested by a fire god’s head with writhing scarlet snakes for hair. The charioteer stood ready, a skinny dark-eyed boy barely older than Diana, and she stared over her shoulder at him as Marcella hauled her out through the stable doors.
“Your eyes are about to fall out of your head.” Stopping to pluck a few wisps of straw from Diana’s hair. “Have you finally fallen in love? Lollia will be so pleased.”
“I’m not in love with him.” Diana brushed that thought away just as she brushed away Marcella’s hands. “I want to
be
him.”
No doubt. Plenty of people liked to hiss rumors about Diana’s reputation, but Marcella didn’t believe that her youngest cousin haunted the stables for the charioteers. Plenty of fine ladies might flop on their backs for a famous driver, but not Diana. At a Lupercalia faction party last year, Marcella had watched the star charioteer for the Blues trail his fingers along Diana’s neck and ask her if she wouldn’t like a walk in the moonlit gardens—and Diana had fixed him with a blank blue-green stare and said, “I wouldn’t walk out of a burning house with a man who steered a turn as badly as you.” Not a girl with hayrick tumbles on her mind.
If Diana
had
a mind. Marcella had never been entirely sure. How much did horses think?
Diana glared at her as they started up the broad path away from the faction stables. “You didn’t wear red.”
“It’s pink. Sort of red.”
“But there’s no pink faction!”
No, not much of a mind there.
They returned to the Cornelii box, where Diana dropped a kiss on the head of her absentminded father. As beautiful as his daughter, Marcella thought, and just as crazy. Nicknamed Paris by the besotted women of Rome, after the prince whose pretty face won him Helen of Troy. Diana’s father wasn’t so interested in causing trouble as
that
Paris, though. In fact, he wasn’t interested in anything but sculpting marble.
What really annoys the family is how good he is.
Even now he sat ignoring anyone who tried to talk to him and making sketches for his statues. “Good face,” he told Cornelia’s startled centurion, Densus or whatever his name was. “You might make me a good Vulcan. Maybe a Neptune if you had a beard. How long would it take you to grow a beard? Profile, please.”
“Um,” the centurion stammered. “I’m on duty.”
“You can be on duty in profile, can’t you? Turn around.”
Diana was looking at the centurion and the row of silent Praetorians at the wall behind him. “What are they doing here?” she asked Marcella. “Arresting us?”
“No, they’re Cornelia’s new toys.” Marcella took a handful of grapes from a silver bowl. “Piso’s bound to be announced heir any day now.”
“Piso likes the races,” Diana said, hopeful. “He won’t cancel festivals if he becomes Emperor, will he?”
“He likes everything and will cancel nothing. It would be too much of a decision for him.” Marcella looked over at her sister’s husband where he stood with a wine cup and several senators. He was nodding seriously at something, but then he was always nodding seriously.
Lucius is bad enough
, Marcella thought,
but eight years of Piso would have me dead from boredom.
“Your precious Reds will be safe.”
“Don’t joke. It’s looking like a lean winter for the charioteers, with Galba canceling celebrations left and right. ‘Frivolous waste of funds,’ he calls them.” Diana flopped her folded arms on the marble balustrade, contemplating the circus with its fantastic carved
spina
and golden dolphins, shut up and shrouded for the long Galban winter. “The horses will go stale.”
“Cheer up. Galba’s sure to die soon.”
Diana looked at her. “And they all think I’m the shocking one.”
“I run around with parchment and pens, not charioteers,” Marcella said cheerfully, reaching for more grapes. “Much more respectable.”
Diana cast her eyes back to the circus. Marcella turned to take a goblet from a slave and noted Lollia and her new husband hissing at each other in low voices, almost nose to nose.
“—disgracing me! No wife of mine paints herself in public like a whore.”
“Your last wife
was
a whore, Vinius. You divorced her for humping half of Gaul, or did you think we hadn’t all heard about
that
here in Rome?” Lollia looked very bright and pretty in violent magenta silk checkered in silver around the hem and a pearl-and-silver necklace, but the glare she aimed at her new husband was ferocious.
He glared back. “Wipe your face, or I will send you home.”
“I’ll speak to my grandfather about this.” Scrubbing at her cheeks in angry little jerks.
“Do. That vulgar old freedman will never—”
“
What
did you call him? After he paid your debts and funded your campaign for—”
Cornelia’s voice broke through the hissing. “Flavia, be careful!”
Lollia’s little daughter had escaped her mother’s lap and was trying to climb up the railing of the box. Cornelia started forward, but the centurion at her back had moved first. He swooped the little girl up capably, his professional hardness cracking into a friendly grin as he returned her to Lollia’s lap. Lollia gave a last scowl to her new husband and hugged her daughter absently.
“Thank you, Centurion.” Cornelia touched his arm in thanks and rounded on Lollia. “You couldn’t keep a closer eye on her? Three years old, you know she’s climbing into everything—she could have fallen!”
“With your gallant centurion standing guard?” Lollia fluttered her lashes at the chestnut-haired Praetorian. Senator Vinius glared again.
“I see you’d rather flirt than watch your own daughter.” Cornelia looked as if she’d like to say more—a great deal more—but she just gave Lollia one last heartfelt glare and glided away to join Piso. Lollia just shrugged, gave a final narrow-eyed look to her husband, and moved pointedly away to join Marcella. Little Flavia wriggled in her arms, crowing, and Lollia set her down and gave her a diamond bracelet to play with. Flavia cooed, twirling the bracelet around her chubby wrist.
“Definitely your daughter,” Marcella said.
“Old Flaccid over there has her so cowed she hardly speaks anymore. I’m divorcing him if it’s the last thing I do.”
“Your shortest marriage yet,” said Marcella. “Three weeks! If only mine were that short—”
A dutiful cheer started, and Marcella looked up to see Emperor Galba making his way into the Imperial box. He looked sour, doubtless counting the cost of everything. The chariots came out to much louder cheers. The warm surge of applause rose tier by tier, the plebs surging to their feet and screaming for their favorite faction, the patricians putting their palms together in more restrained approval. Seven teams: three for the Green, all twelve horses tossing the tall green plumes on their heads; one for the Blues with their famous blood bays; one for the Whites—and two for the Reds.
With all the cheers for the chariots and the bustle of guests, no one should have noticed the entrance of one more man in the Cornelii box. But everyone did, Marcella saw—everyone. A shorter man than Piso, with glossy dark curls and teeth that gleamed, his lawn synthesis flamboyantly patterned in gold, a ring on each hand and a gold chain about his neck. He paused in the entrance of the box to let everyone look at him, his smile embracing the crowd, lighting it as if a torch had been carried before him.
“I know I’m late,” the newcomer said airily, “but surely you all forgive me?” Most of the guests smiled involuntarily, Marcella noted. All but her sister, whose brows creased in a faint frown.
“Senator Otho?” Lollia whispered. “Gods, what’s
he
doing here?”
“Do you know him?” Marcella asked.
“Oh, we bounced the bed a few times back in the old days, when he and Nero were such good friends. Do you know him, my honey?” Lollia gave a reminiscent smile. “He’s well worth knowing, believe me.”
Marcella knew
of
Senator Marcus Salvius Otho, of course—one of Emperor Nero’s boon companions, at least until the minor problem arose when Nero fell in love with Otho’s wife, married her, then kicked her to death.
But did I ever
meet
him before?
The narrow, clever face looked familiar somehow.
Familiar or not, Senator Otho had a pair of red-and-gold Praetorians at his back, just like Piso’s.
Well, well
, Marcella thought.
Does Piso have a rival?
Perhaps her brother-in-law’s ascension to Imperial heir wasn’t so certain as everyone assumed. Given Cornelia’s suddenly neutral expression, she was thinking exactly the same thing.
“My dear Lollia!” Otho paused before them, his black eyes sparkling amusement. “It’s been an age. You’re newly married? Congratulations, Senator Vinius,” he called across the box. “You have caught Rome’s most charming woman for a wife. And you, Lollia, have snared Rome’s wisest statesman!”
Vinius preened, mollified. Otho smiled again dazzlingly, and Marcella noted how many of the guests whispered behind their hands as they looked at him. Piso was looking decidedly nonplussed now.
“Reds!” Diana jumped up with a raucous cheer as the Reds chariots paraded past on the track below.
“Reds!”
Otho’s amused gaze transferred to Diana. “There’s a young lady who likes the races.” A titter rippled through his party—like Nero, he traveled in a party of sculpted women and gleaming men; everyone young, everyone handsome, everyone amusing. He had taken over the Cornelii box like it was his own. “So this is the charming little Cornelia Quarta, for whom half my friends are perishing of love! Or I hear you are called Diana? How very fitting—”
“Sshh!” Diana hushed him impatiently, leaning forward over the railing, and let out a cry with the rest of the crowd as the cloth dropped and twenty-eight horses surged forward over the sand, noses straining and colored plumes blowing. Emperor Galba sat hunched in his box reviewing his accounts, but the plebs were all on their feet, shouting, waving colored pennants, clutching their medallions as the chariots flew into the hairpin turn at lunatic speeds. Even Marcella had to admit it was a stirring sight. Where else could you find two hundred fifty thousand people all going mad at once?
Perhaps a war . . .
“Stir them up!” Diana shouted down at the first Reds charioteer as he got rattled out of the turn and dropped into fourth.
“Gods’ wheels, stir them up!”
“You’ll have to excuse my cousin, Senator Otho.” Cornelia approached with outstretched hands, her smile serene and warm—but Marcella knew her sister and saw the unease at the back of her eyes as she looked at Otho’s Praetorians. “Diana lives for the Reds, and nothing we can say will quell her.”
“Don’t quell her,” Otho said. “She’s an original, and I like originals. I see you are an original as well, my very great lady.” He captured Cornelia’s hand, which she withdrew when he pressed too warmly.
“Lady Statilia, how lovely to see you—” Cornelia moved on to the ladies and praetors and tribunes in Otho’s party, each of whom she knew by name and family, and Piso, who had been hanging awkwardly in the background, was now hanging on his wife’s arm, making himself known to all, and Otho frowned. Especially when he noted the Praetorians at Cornelia’s back too, who scurried to her lifted finger like obedient slaves.
“Pity Cornelia can’t be Emperor,” Marcella mused aloud to no one in particular, and Otho’s sharp ear caught it.
“Very true, Lady.” He gave a bow, eyes raking her face. “Cornelia Secunda, isn’t it? I believe I know you already.”
“We’ve never been formally introduced, Senator.” Marcella tilted her head quizzically.
“No, but I remember that Emperor Nero once found you beautiful. I am not surprised to find him right.”
A cry from Diana as the Blues pulled ahead in the fourth lap. “I’ll die if they win,” she whispered, eyes following the storm of sand. “I’ll
die
—” Half of Otho’s tribunes were clustered about her, shouting down at the arena, but Marcella’s ears had blocked out the din.
“I don’t care to discuss that night, Senator,” she said finally. “What’s done is done.”
“Then you are a courageous lady—and one who holds my admiration.”
Marcella sipped at her wine, not tasting it. She had seen the former Emperor often enough, from a distance: waving to the cheering plebs with a gold wreath perched on his false curls, reciting his own poetry to properly respectful courtiers, whispering in the ears of beautiful women who were not his various ill-fated Empresses. But up close? That warm night at Lollia’s party this spring, she had seen a man with ruddy, pleasant features . . . and eyes that gleamed at all times, as if with a fever.