The woman who arrived at the Varro house the following morning was not Princess Daria.
She was Daria's aunt, the Lady Severa — a woman of perhaps fifty winters who wore her age the way old swords wore their dents: as evidence of victories, not defeats. She arrived without announcement in a litter bearing the Eastern provincial crest, accepted the chair Livia offered with the air of someone accustomed to better, and declined the wine.
"I will be direct," she said.
"Please," said Livia, who had been awake since dawn cataloguing her mistakes and had arrived at this meeting with the hollow steadiness of someone who has already imagined the worst.
"You have been seen twice in close conversation with the Crown Prince." Severa's eyes were dark and extremely attentive. "Once in the garden of the imperial palace. Once at Cornelius's house. You are not the first woman to find him interesting, and you will not be the last, but you are currently the most visible, and that creates difficulties."
"For Princess Daria."
"For everyone." Severa folded her hands in her lap with the composed deliberateness of a woman who had navigated forty years of imperial politics and still had all her fingers. "My niece is not a fragile creature. She understands the realities of her position. She understands that powerful men have — interests — that run parallel to their official obligations." A brief pause. "What she cannot survive is public humiliation. What the provincial alliance cannot survive is the appearance that Rome does not consider our family worthy of basic respect."
Livia looked at the woman across from her and recognized, not for the first time, that she was the least powerful person in this conversation.
"I have done nothing improper," she said.
"No. You have not. Yet." Severa's gaze was steady and not unkind, which was somehow worse than contempt would have been. "You are an intelligent woman, Livia Varro. You understand what I am telling you."
She did. With complete and awful clarity, she did.
"My family's situation," Livia said carefully, "is already precarious. The disgrace of the grain scandal—"
"Would become considerably more precarious," Severa said quietly, "if certain interested parties chose to revisit it. Your father's case was closed but not sealed. There are senators who would enjoy the opportunity to examine it again." She rose from the chair, smoothing her robes with unhurried elegance. "I take no pleasure in this conversation. But I would be doing you a disservice to let you believe that your choices exist in isolation from their consequences."
She left without the wine and without a farewell, and Livia sat in the empty room for a long time after, listening to the fountain in the garden and thinking about walls.
The women on the walls.
That evening, a small message went out from the Varro house to the palace. It was addressed to no one in particular and said only that the Lady Livia Varro would be unable to accept further social invitations for the foreseeable future due to a family obligation.
It was politely worded and carefully ambiguous.
Livia wrote it three times before she was satisfied, then sealed it and gave it to the messenger before she could change her mind.
She did not sleep well.
In the palace, Lucian read the message twice, set it down, and stood at his window looking out at Rome for a long time. He recognized the language of retreat. He recognized, too, what it had cost her to send it.
He thought about sending a reply.
He did not.
Not yet.
Instead he went to find his chamberlain and told the man, with a pleasantness that made the chamberlain deeply uneasy, that the household was to be informed that all private correspondence passing through his offices was to be treated as entirely confidential henceforth, on pain of immediate dismissal.
The chamberlain noted this instruction with a carefully neutral expression and immediately began composing a very careful letter of his own