Free Empress of the Seven Hills by Kate Quinn

HAPTER 4
    SABINA
    Sabina liked the terrace of the Baiae villa. On fine evenings she had the steward pull out the couches so dinner could be served outside, wrapped in warm summer breezes with the shadows lengthening across the tiles and the expanse of blue sea glittering beyond. She looked over the bowls of grapes sometimes and imagined that she was seeing all the way beyond the horizon to the great promontories at the mouth of the sea. Hadrian had been born in Hispania; he’d described those promontories to her with hands flying and eyes aglow. The Pillars of Hercules, salt spray flying about them, with the wide ocean and the wider world beyond.
    “So wonderful to have a little vacation all together,” Calpurnia was saying, balancing little Linus against her arm as she tried to split a pomegranate one-handed. The last baby had given her a passion for oysters, but this time around it was pomegranate seeds. “Marcus, promise me you won’t go back to Rome for at least a month. You need the rest.”
    Sabina nibbled absently on a strip of roast goose, eyes still on the horizon. What lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules? North, of course, lay Britannia. But what lay west? What lay
all
the way west? Hadrian didn’t know, and wasn’t much interested. “Wild places,” he’d said dismissively. “Why worry about the world’s wilderness, Vibia Sabina, when the civilized world has more than you could ever explore in a dozen lifetimes?”
    “I can’t stay here all summer,” Sabina’s father was protesting. “I’m working on a new treatise.” So many senators, Sabina had often noticed, looked uneasy and vulnerable out of their togas, like turtles suddenly missing their shells. But her father, even when relaxed on the dining couch in a plain tunic with little Faustina curled under his arm, looked like an emperor.
    “The treatise can wait,” Calpurnia was insisting. “We can all go to the sulfur pools; it’ll bake that foul city air right out of your lungs.” She pressed a pomegranate seed into his mouth with pink-stained fingers, stilling his protests.
    “You know the rules, Father.” Sabina grinned. “One month here for every pomegranate seed you’ve eaten. Just like Proserpina and Pluto.”
    “Oh, good, that’s one month.” Calpurnia plucked out more seeds. “Two, three, four—”
    “And I thought it was a good idea to give my daughter a classical education,” Marcus shook his head.
    “Father, you really should stay a while. Calpurnia feels so sick in the middle months, and she’s always better when you’re here.”
    Marcus at once looked worried, taking his wife’s pomegranate-sticky hand. Calpurnia squeezed his fingers with no more than a twinkle of her lashes at Sabina, who hid her own smile in her cup. Her stepmother was approximately as frail as a mountain pony, but she and Sabina had long entered into a tacit conspiracy where any method from mild misdirection to outright lying was appropriate when it came to the care of the man they mutually adored.
    “We’ll make a summer of it here, then,” Marcus was deciding. “The five of us. I’ll have time to start teaching Faustina—some Greek, some rhetoric—”
    “Marcus, love, she’s barely five. What are you trying to prepare her for, a career in the Senate?”
    “Mix the Greek verbs in with a good bedtime story and they’ll go down easy.” Marcus ruffled the little fair head under his arm.
    “I like stories,” Faustina volunteered around a mouthful of roastgoose. “Father has the
best
stories. Like the one where the king got murdered in his bath! And the one where the prince had to kill his mother—”
    “Greek tragedies, Marcus?” Calpurnia gave her husband a look that made Sabina giggle. “As
bedtime stories
?”
    “Sanitized,” he hedged. “I leave out all the gory details…”
    “You did not!” Sabina laughed. “At least not when you were telling them to me!”
    “Did he tell you the one where the king gets ripped apart