Read Empress of the Seven Hills for Free Online Page A

his lively face still.
    “Do you think about it?” Sabina asked. “The Colosseum.”
    “No.” Vix’s voice was curt, and he shoved a drunk out of their path with more force than was necessary. The drunk just beamed and gave a tipsy “
Ave Vinalia!
” before lurching off into the dusk. “I dream about it sometimes,” Vix added abruptly.
    “I wish I dreamed,” Sabina confessed. “I haven’t, not since my epilepsia went.”
    She’d fallen into fits as a child, but she’d been cured by the usual remedy of a gladiator’s blood. The closest gladiator had been Vix: thirteen, wounded, and just out of his first bout. She’d been there in the crowd to see him get the wound—a sword into the shoulder, which might not have been too bad except that Vix had forced his shoulder farther up the blade to get within arm’s reach of his much bigger opponent and make the kill.
Probably why I kissed him when I finally met him face to face
, Sabina thought.
He was a sight!
    “You miss the epilepsia?” Vix asked. The sky had faded from pink to violet now.
    “Mmm, not the fits. But I do miss dreams. The gods talk to us in our dreams. Does that mean they’ll never talk to me?”
    “Don’t know if I’d want to talk to a god.”
    “It might be interesting. So many gods, you know.”
    “You might get one of the animal-headed ones. Scary.”
    “Oh, I’m not easily scared.”
    “That I believe, Lady.”
    Sabina let him steer her around a fat man passed out in the street. Many Vinalia revelers had taken too much of the harvest wine and now lay slumped against walls snoring up at the darkening sky. Sabina’ssandals made soft echoes against the stones as they wound through a series of narrow streets, and she was just about to ask with some amusement if he wasn’t taking her the long way home when someone leaped out of the shadows and bashed Vix over the head.
    “You like that?” a reeking voice snarled, and Sabina recognized the Blues fan from the circus whose nose Vix had bloodied.
He must have found some friends after all
, Sabina thought, and then someone else rushed past with a rough knock to her shoulder and sent her sprawling. She raised herself on her hands, her hip stinging painfully where she’d fallen, and saw Vix get one good punch off before two men doubled his left arm up behind him. The first man in the blue tunic staggered back with a muffled grunt, bleeding all over again from the nose, but he came back with a hammer blow. Vix yelled, ringing Sabina’s ears like a bell, and then another of Blue Tunic’s friends came out of the shadows and got him by the other arm. Vix braced himself, swearing thickly, and Blue Tunic was just cocking a fist back when a rock descended on the back of his head.
    “Goodness,” Sabina said as he fell, hefting the muddy chunk of stone she’d managed to snatch up from the gutter. “That makes quite a
thunk
, doesn’t it?”
    “
Hit him again!
” Vix yelled, head-butting into the man on his left.
    “Oh, sorry,” Sabina said hastily, and knelt down with the stone. She studied Blue Tunic a moment—she didn’t want to kill him, after all—and finally decided on a medium-strength blow just above the other ear. That took care of his muzzy efforts to get up, and Sabina rose to see if Vix needed any more help, but he seemed to have things well in hand. He’d dropped one thug with a cocked elbow into the throat followed by a knee up into the belly, then turned on the other two. He came at them with a snarl, teeth bared like a wolf, and suddenly they were both brushing past Sabina and stumbling up the street.
    “He should have picked better friends,” Sabina observed.
    “You think fast on your feet,” Vix panted. He cuffed blood off his lip: tall, tense, still taut with energy. “Thanks, Lady.”
    “Don’t mention it.” She rose, tossing the loose stone away and feeling quite pleased with herself. “My first fight, and I dropped one all by myself. It’s been a good