Herennius’s eyes flicked down to the papers held in Latona’s slender fingers, then back up to her face. “Just a husbandly interest,” he said, the edge in his voice turning toward a snarl, “in who my wife corresponds with.”
Latona raised her chin. “I correspond with many people. I can’t imagine what interest you would find in the vast majority of my letters.” She held the packet out toward him. “By all means. Investigate further, if it would put your mind at ease.”
Herennius’s fingers twitched. For a moment, Latona thought he might call her bluff—but then he seemed to determine that it would be undignified to do so. “Just have a care,” he grumbled, turning away from her. “You and I both know you can’t afford to be the target of unseemly rumors.” With that last loosed arrow, Herennius shuffled back into his room, summoning a slave to help him change for dinner, and Latona finally released the sigh that had been caught at the back of her voice.
Magical energy prickled in her right hand. Fire and Spirit, ever rooted in a mage’s emotions, asserted themselves more forcefully on days she had been deliberately practicing. ‘A year ago, I might have set the room on fire after that conversation.’ A year ago, she had set the room on fire when her magic spiraled out of control after a pique. Not directly; no mage since the Age of Heroes had been able to create fire out of nothingness, to snap their fingers and summon it. Latona could, however, increase the size of an already existing flame, and the previous summer, in the wake of Dictator Ocella’s death and the turmoil that followed, Latona’s powers had fallen into the habit of overheating lamps until they exploded.
She gave her hand a sharp shake, dispelling the swelling energy. The lamps on the nearby altar flared gently, then subsided.
Control was important for all mages, and for those blessed with volatile elements most of all. But control, she had learned, did not have to mean suppression.
* * *
Latona read the letter in the privacy of her own room. Herennius had been mistaken—or else deliberately trying to trap her. The letter had not been posted from Iberia, but from Nedhena, the legion-founded town on the north side of the Pyreneian Mountains. The paper was cheap and flimsy, the hand imperfect with too-quick strokes, but just the sight of it warmed Latona. She took delight in knowing that Sempronius had written the letter himself; she could tell the difference between his slightly smudged strokes and the precise lines his scribe inked onto the messages sent to her father. Thinking of his fingers gripping the stylus, imagining his face as he composed the words, an unbidden smile found its way onto her lips.
“You keep looking like that every time he is sending you a letter,” came Merula’s accented voice from behind her, “and I am thinking you are not keeping secrets much longer.” Latona submitted to her attendant’s chiding as readily as to her quick hands, which moved to unfasten the copper-tipped ties on her gown. Merula, a Phrygian-born slave, had been given a gladiatrix’s training to act as bodyguard to her mistress, in lieu of the decorative arts or household management skills that a lady of Latona’s class would typically seek in an omnipresent servant. Merula considered it her duty to protect Latona in ways other than the physical, and lately, that concern extended to reminding Latona of the legal perils of adulterous behavior. Latona knew the dangers, knew how foolish and incautious she had been the previous winter, when for once she had chosen to give her heart free rein.
She could not be sorry for it. That Saturnalia had liberated more than her fleshly desires. In letting heat and passion consume her, Latona had discovered just how much of Venus’s fire truly lived within her—and how small and sad she had allowed her world to become.
As Merula worked around her, stripping off her day garments and tying her into a gown more suitable for dinner, Latona lifted the letter and read.
Its tone was the same as the others she had received from Sempronius since his Januarius departure from Aven: friendly without overt intimacy, no hint of impropriety, no pet names or endearments. Much though she might have wished for messages of greater passion, the absence of ardor was safer. If Herennius did take it into his head to open his wife’s mail, he would find nothing incriminating.
‘. . . Eager as I am to reach the Iberian plateaus, I admit that Maritima is not without its charms. One can easily see why the Tyrians settled here when they fled burning Ilion—and why plundering pirates have been drawn to the region equally as long. The land is well-watered and verdant, and the sea at Massilia is even bluer than that of Crater Bay. We did not tarry long in Massilia herself, but I liked the feel of the old place. Not as large or messy as our beloved Aven, but it seems all the peoples of the Middle Sea have left residue of themselves here, carved into the white rocks of the Maritiman shoreline.
‘I hope your studies continue well, and that you have not yet had need to strangle Aemilia Fullia or anyone else standing between you and improvement.
‘I remain,
‘Yours in friendship,
‘V. Sempronius Tarren’
Tsking, Merula jabbed a pin into Latona’s hair a tad harder than was necessary to secure the mantle among her golden curls. “Blushing, Domina.”
“I can’t control my skin, Merula.”
“Should be trying.”
Merula only meant it for her safety, of course; she cared, if possible, even less for Herennius himself than Latona did. Latona hated the sound of those words nonetheless, echoing Aemilia’s insistence that she should be trying to be a better wife. Somewhere in the last year, her impetus to make the marriage work had burned away like morning fog under a swiftly rising sun. Now she hoped only to endure it until she could either convince Herennius to surrender his claim to her family’s wealth and connections or else persuade her father to agree there was more advantage in a divorce than safety in the continued bond. ‘Blessed Juno, just let us be rid of each other before things grow worse.’
She wished that her father would see the unsuitability of her match and suggest a divorce. It would look so much better if it was Aulus’s idea. That would pass it off as his pragmatism, rather than risking any aspersions being cast upon her character.
‘Then, if Sempronius comes home safe from Iberia, we might—’
But she stamped down hard on the thought. It did no good to yearn for that which was not yet within her grasp.
* * *
Ostia, Truscan Coast
The curse had to be carefully crafted.
Vibia Sempronia Mellanis wished no misfortune upon the soldiers of the Second Legion, nor upon the sailors ferrying them across the Middle Sea to Gades. At least, no more than ill luck had brought them already, placing them not under the command of Vibia’s brother, Sempronius Tarren, but instead that of Praetor Lucretius Rabirus. ‘Tribulations will find them soon enough under his leadership without any help from me,’ she thought, tucking wind-stripped wisps of dark hair back beneath her mantle. She stood in Ostia’s market, near the temple to Volturnus, waiting.