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over her in pleasant appreciation. Marcella was glad she’d worn her pale-pink stola , fluted in dozens of intricate folds like the pillars of a temple. No jewelry—Lucius had sold her last string of pearls to bribe the governor of Lower Germania last year—but Marcella knew she didn’t need jewelry to be noticed. Who cared if her olive skin wasn’t much next to Lollia’s vivid complexion, if her hair was dead-leaf brown to Cornelia’s rich dark coils, and if her features didn’t have nearly the beauty and delicacy of Diana’s? Marcella counted herself the proud owner of the best breasts in the entire family. “Possibly all Rome,” Lollia often sighed, enviously. “What I’d give for a figure like yours!” Even a scholarly man like Marcus Norbanus, Marcella was glad to see, wasn’t above a glance of appreciation.
    “I was sorry to hear about your recent misfortunes, Senator.” Marcus’s descent from Emperor Augustus had clearly made Galba nervous, because one of his first actions after taking the purple had been to strip Marcus of most of his lands and estates. “I think it very unfair.”
    “Emperors have disliked me before,” Marcus said dryly. “I expect I’ll survive.”
    “On the other hand, you’ve had some good fortune as well.”
    “Such as?” He raised graying brows—he was only thirty-five or so, but he’d already begun to gray rather devastatingly around the edges.
    “On getting rid of Tullia, of course.” Marcella lowered her voice. “That certainly deserves congratulations.”
    He smiled—too polite, of course, to disparage a woman. Even a woman who richly deserved it. Why did the nicest men always end up with the nastiest wives?
    At least Tullia and Marcus’s three-year-old son took after his father. Little Paulinus stood round-eyed and well behaved at Marcus’s side, ignored by his mother, and when Marcus unpacked the paperwork he usually took to the races, Marcella bent down and whispered into the little ear. Paulinus nodded happily, trotting off, and five minutes later there was a shriek as Tullia discovered a beetle in her wine goblet.
    “Marcella, can you find Diana for me? She’s already disappeared into the stables.” Cornelia cast her eyes to the heavens. She might not be a mother yet , Marcella thought, but she has the exasperated sigh down to perfection. “And of course Lollia’s flirting with my new centurion. I swear, if I didn’t have you, the other two would drive me stark raving mad!”
    “Then be glad you have me.”
    The stables of the Circus Maximus: a different world, Marcella often thought. The whisper of straw and the swearing of stable boys, the creak of wheels, the grooms rushing back and forth with arm-loads of harness. The roars of the crowd filtering down distantly from the tiers, the charioteers muttering their prayers and fingering their good-luck charms, the stallions giving their full-throated whinnies. A different world—certainly not Marcella’s world, as the grooms and charioteers and even the horses seemed to know, looking at her dubiously as she picked through the straw and manure. But oddly enough, it was Diana’s world.
    Marcella found her youngest cousin in the Reds quarter beside the Reds faction director, a squat bald man named Xerxes who looked like a scarred frog. They stared with equal concentration at a quartet of gray stallions tied to the grooming posts.
    “They’re getting old,” Diana was saying. “We need a new team for backup.”
    “They have a few victories left in them.”
    Diana walked behind the stallions, too close as she trailed her hand down a glossy flank, but horses never seemed to kick Diana. She should have been as out-of-place as Marcella—a pretty little thing with her scarlet silks and pale hair—but no one gave her a second glance. The faction director for the Reds had given up trying to boot her out by the time she was eight, when he found her playing unconcerned under the belly of a stallion who