Free Rome: The Emperor's Spy: Rome 1 by M. C. Scott

friend and has been learning to infer things from scent. Apparently one’s hair smells of horse piss if one stays too long in the stables.’
    ‘Good that I have no hair, then.’ Ajax laughed softly, and sobered. ‘Is Math all right?’
    Hannah shrugged. ‘He has someone new who pays him in silver. And he’s … different, less petulant.’
    ‘That would make a pleasant change.’
    Ajax smoothed his hand over his naked scalp. Watching him, Hannah realized she had no idea how old he was, only that he was younger than she had first thought, closer to her own age, in fact, and that the scars on his back and shoulders were not, as she had imagined, purely from falls taken racing.
    It was a strange mistake to have made. Caught at an angle by the firelight, his scars were quite clearly layered, set years apart, and those at the top, the most recent, carried the savage incoherence of battle.
    Beneath them, less chaotically, ran the ripped lines of the flail and beneath those, straighter yet, were splayed the regular cuts of ritual; a warrior ritual in all probability, although she had not heard of such things taking place among the Greeks since before the time of Alexander. She wanted to ask how he had come by them, but didn’t know how.
    ‘Did the river tell you about the race tomorrow?’ she asked instead.
    ‘Not entirely,’ he said. ‘I asked for help. Whether the request is granted remains to be seen. One can never fully know.’ His eyes returned to the flames a while, listening to the crack of green wood burning. ‘Do you have gods?’ he asked, presently.
    That stole her breath. Such a question wasn’t asked of semi-strangers, here on the edges of the world, where Nero proclaimed himself divine and it was a capital offence not to worship him; where the dreamers of Britain, so recently vanquished, were said to visit and men still held to the old gods of moon and water and listened to what they said.
    Ajax waited, looking into his fire. His face showed only polite enquiry. Unlike the Gauls, unlike any Greeks she had met, he was not a man to write his thoughts across his face.
    ‘My father had a god,’ Hannah said, surprising herself, ‘and died for it at Rome’s hand. After his death, my mother left her two sons and went to Alexandria. I was born there six months later. In Alexandria, I learned …’
    On a whim, she looked up. Tents huddled about, but none too near, and the lines of the horse stalls were silent; nobody was close enough to hear. She made a decision and hoped she would not regret it.
    ‘What do you know of the Sibylline sisters?’ she asked.
    Ajax bit the edge of his thumb, considering. ‘I know they’re Egyptian by habit if not by birth and that the Romans are in awe of them as they are of no other women, possibly even afraid of them. Apart from that, I know only that they are respected across the empire as oracles and prophets, that they live in seclusion, keeping themselves unmarried, and— Ah.’
    That last a short, violent out-breath. ‘So will you never marry?’ For all his self-possession, he couldn’t hide the broken hope in his eyes.
    The fire burned less fiercely than it had done. Hannah leaned forward and busied herself laying on more wood. ‘I’m not one of the sisters,’ she said. ‘My mother was, but she married my father in fulfilment of a prophecy. After his death, she came back. I was raised among them, and trained at their expense. I did—’
    ‘Find love among them?’
    She had not thought he might read her as she read him. With a hazel twig, she stirred the fire. Sparks danced amid drifting ash. Memories returned, and were banished, as she always banished them. ‘The rashness of youth,’ she said reflectively, ‘is exceptional only in its self-belief.’
    His gaze rested on her face. ‘I am at the behest of an oracle of sorts,’ he said at last. ‘My sister dreamed that I would come here, and perhaps return home in the high summer with a brother I had