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deeply insensitive. “Do you want me to talk to him?”
    “No! He’ll know I’ve told you. What’s the matter with him, Gaius? Why would he ask a question like that? It was as if he thought Justinus might have run away. So now I don’t know what to do. If we call his spirit to a tomb and he’s still alive somewhere—what would happen to him?”
    Ruso, who had no idea, said nothing.
    “I wanted to go into town and ask Probus what he meant but Lucius says fussing won’t bring my brother back and if I’m not careful I’ll upset Probus and then we’ll be in more trouble.”
    Ruso reflected that Lucius was probably right. The familial ties with Probus might be severed, but they still owed him money, and the last thing they needed was a hostile creditor.
    “I was hoping you might know something.”
    “It’s not unusual for ships to vanish, Cass,” he said, realizing she had probably never seen an expanse of water bigger than the swimming pool at the town baths in Nemausus. “You can’t imagine how vast the seas are if you haven’t seen them. It could have been hit by a freak wave, or gone too close to the rocks, or . . .” Catching the expression on her face, he realized this speculation was not helpful. “There are lots of things, really. Nobody would know until it didn’t turn up at the other end.”
    “I tried asking the fish sellers in town,” she said. “They said perhaps it was sunk by a falling star. They didn’t want to talk to me.”
    “I don’t know about the star,” he said, “but I’d imagine people who earn their living on the water don’t want to spend too much time discussing shipwrecks.”
    “I don’t want to cause trouble, Gaius. I just want to know what’s happened to my brother. There’s nobody else left to look after him.”
    “Of course.” Ruso was wondering whether he was witnessing the obstinacy of hope or whether there really could be something odd about the disappearance of the Pride of the South when a masculine voice out in the hall bellowed, “Gaius! Where are you, brother?”
    Cass put a hand on Ruso’s arm. “Please don’t say anything to him,” she murmured. “He’s cross enough with me already.” She retreated to the door. Ruso heard a brief exchange in the hallway and a moment later she was replaced by a paunchy middle-aged man with thinning hair and bags under his eyes. Ruso opened his arms and braced himself.

8
    T HE LATEST HUG turned out to be less enthusiastic than the one from his sister-in-law. When they had clung to each other for what Ruso felt was a decent length of time, they held each other at arm’s length. Ruso politely informed the middle-aged man that he was looking well.
    “No I’m not.”
    “No, you’re not,” agreed Ruso, relieved that he had not been the first of them to say it. “I got your letter.”
    “Gaius.” Lucius’s breathing was audible, as if the lungs were weighed down with the bulk of the paunch. “This is very bad timing.”
    “I couldn’t get here any faster. I know you had to be careful, but you might have given me some idea of what the problem was.”
    Lucius glanced behind him and closed the door. “How many people know you’re home?”
    “How long has this legal business been going on?”
    Lucius smoothed the top of his thinning hair. “We could probably keep it quiet. The staff won’t talk. Did you see anyone you knew on the road?”
    Ruso frowned. “You didn’t say anything about coming home in secret.”
    Lucius subsided onto the chair that Ruso still thought of as belonging to their father. “I don’t know what we’re going to do now. Not now that you’ve turned up.”
    Ruso stared at him. “But you’re the one who wrote and asked me to come home!”
    The tired eyes that reminded him of his own seemed to be displaying equal bafflement. “No I didn’t. That’s the last thing I would have done.”
    Ruso pondered the remote possibility that the letter had said, ‘Do not come home.’