The Cornelii house burned like a small sun over the street. Light on marble, petals on water, a hundred voices weaving a net over wine. Lucius had already done the circuit: smiles, names, the easy lies of privilege. Now he had something better—Octavius's mind, and a thread to pull on Wednesday.
He left the colonnade with the dwarf's empty cup in his hand and the shape of the garden mapped in his head—guards at the side gate, a servant's door that never quite shut, a shadowed path past the olive trees where voices dropped when they thought no one listened.
Livia reappeared at his elbow, the kind of smile that meant a question. "You abandon princes to sit with ghosts?"
"He's the only Cornelius worth listening to," Lucius said. "He sees the room the way it is."
"That alone makes him dangerous," she said, then added with a hint of pride, "and makes you interesting."
A new knot formed near the fountain—Petronius holding court, turning with theatrical delight as Lucius and Livia approached. "Prince of far horizons," Petronius declared, "Rome needs your eyes. Tell me what we look like to a man who does not owe us everything."
"Like men who mistake the torch for the sun," Lucius said.
Petronius lit up. "He wounds us and gifts us a line to keep. Perfect." He turned to Livia. "Keep him. He makes my verses shorter."
Livia's laugh cut softer than usual. She touched Lucius's arm, a small, proprietary press. It did not go unnoticed. Across the garden, an older man watched them without watching—the same ring Cassius's steward had described gleaming twice as the torchlight caught it. The name Gallo slid into place again, not as a solution but as a stone in a wall.
A steward reached Livia with the speed of a man who knew how to approach without becoming part of the scene. "Domina," he murmured. "Your father asks that you greet Tribune Flaccus before you depart."
Livia's lashes lowered, the way they did when she filed a thing under useful. "We'll go shortly," she said, then to Lucius: "Walk with me."
They crossed into cooler air beneath painted beams. The tribune stood with two clients—a hawk of a man whose smile stopped a step from his eyes. Livia executed the courtesies; Lucius played the foreigner with polite questions and precise ignorance. He gave the tribune nothing to hold, and let him think he had something anyway.
On the way back to the garden, Livia's fingers found his wrist and squeezed once. "You perform restraint," she said. "It looks good on you."
"I prefer when it's not a performance," he said.
"Liar," she breathed, amused.
The night crested with a poem too long by half and applause too long by half again. Gifts were opened, blessings invoked, the boy of the hour a little drunk on his new voice. Lucius drifted, as a rock drifts in a river—everything moved around him, changed slightly by his shape, forgot to notice how.
At the colonnade, Octavius's bench sat empty. A servant refilled cups that would not be drunk. Lucius made a note: Wednesday. Forum library. A place where men made of paper might speak more freely.
On the periphery, two young blades argued strategy over dice, their boasts careless enough to be useful. A father-son pair exchanged a glance that said everything about money and nothing about love. A matron with iron in her spine watched it all and missed nothing. Rome in miniature; he folded it into columns.
Livia returned with her cloak. "Time to be missed from someone else's party," she said. "Father has taken his measure."
"Of me, or of the room?" Lucius asked.
"Both," she said. "He liked what he saw. He doesn't like that he liked it."
They took their leave with the proper bows and the improper whispers at their backs. In the carriage, the city unrolled in torchlit bands. Livia leaned into him, the contented animal that comes out when a hunt has gone well. "You told Marcus no," she said into his shoulder. "He will remember. Good."
"He will remember the way I said it," Lucius said. "That matters more."
Back at the Cassiu's gate, Titus waited in the shadow of a column, a small figure with the gravity of a larger one. "Dominus," he said quietly to Lucius, "two things. A note delivered to the service door: blank seal, good linen, no sender. And a man who smelled of the river asked the stable boy if our 'eastern friend' sleeps in the house or the yard."
"Answer?" Lucius asked.
"The boy said: neither. He doesn't sleep," Titus said. "The man laughed too hard."
"The note?" Lucius held out a hand. Titus passed it without seeming to. Inside: a strip of vellum, three words in a neat, careful hand. Second hour. East garden. Alone.
"Your father?" Lucius asked Livia, turning the slip twice.
"He doesn't do drama," she said. "That script looks like Cassius-the-medicus. Or someone trying to look like him."
"Then we'll test it," Lucius said. "And not alone."
"Alone," Livia corrected. "If it's what I think, any shadow becomes a declaration." She cocked her head. "Do you trust my eyes for a balcony?"
"I trust Titus more," Lucius said.
"Wise," she said. "Then both."
They split at the inner stair. Livia toward lamps and mirrors. Lucius toward water and wood. In his small room by the east garden, he ran his hands over the bars to ground himself back in his own weight. A few slow pulls. A breath ladder. The day's silk burned off in sweat; the city's voices thinned to crickets and the soft consonants of servants on stone.
He went to the garden at the second hour. Alone. Which is to say: with three different silences in place—Titus in a shadow, a guard who knew how not to look like one beyond the laurels, Livia on a balcony with the lamp turned away from her face. The fountain muttered. A moth battered itself silly against an oil flame.
Cassius-the-medicus stepped out from a cypress's shade exactly on time, as tidy as his handwriting. His eyes did the same quick, total take they did over open wounds. "Prince," he said mildly. "You make busy nights."
"Rome is busy," Lucius said.
The medicus didn't waste small talk. "The senator wants to borrow your quiet," he said. "Tomorrow. A visitor who understands only demonstrations. You will show him a small truth. Not the whole of you."
"And if the visitor wants more?" Lucius asked.
"He'll think he's seen it," the medicus said. "Your task is to make that true without making it true."
Lucius let a corner of his mouth tilt. "And the other task?"
The medicus looked past him toward the dark where a spear would have been if this were the yard. "You will avoid killing anyone else on Cassian tiles without an order. The head at the barracks served its purpose. The city will talk without us helping it."
"Agreed," Lucius said.
"One more thing," the medicus added. "The dwarf you befriended will make you valuable enemies if you're careless. He will make you valuable friends if you are not."
"I prefer value," Lucius said.
"So do we," the medicus said, and was gone in a way that made you feel you'd imagined him.
Above, a curtain stirred. Livia's face appeared in profile for the length of a breath—approval, desire, the spice of a new complication. Then she was gone too.
Lucius stayed a moment longer in the scent of damp earth and oil, listening to the garden say nothing. Then he went to his room, wrote three words on a shard of wood—Wednesday. Library. Gallo.—and tucked it where only he would look.
He slept hard, the day filing itself without help: the boy-zebra of the Cornelii, the iron matron, the tribune, the poet, the ring that wasn't on the right finger, the dwarf's eyes. The yard would demand blood again in the morning. The city had demanded something else tonight and given him something in return: a mind worth having, a meeting worth keeping, and a reminder that the quiet edge cuts as clean as any blade.
At dawn, he would sweat. At midday, he would show a stranger exactly as much as Cassius had paid for. And on Wednesday, he would sit among scrolls and let Octavius open Rome from the inside.