“Gone,” I told her.
She frowned. “With Magister Verrius?”
“No. Livia sent her with a senator to take him home.”
Juba asked swiftly, “Who? Which one?”
“A man named Gaius.”
He exchanged looks with Octavia, who put her hand on her stomach. “Dear gods,” she whispered. “When did he take her?”
“When everyone went inside to see Claudia’s bridal couch.”
“I know where he lives,” Juba said at once. “Below the south shoulder of the hill. I’ll go.”
“Wait! I know a shortcut,” I told him.
“Where?”
“Behind the Magna Mater.”
Octavia gasped. “Through the woods?”
“We used to use it on our way to the ludus. Before Juba started coming with us.”
Octavia looked at him. “Do you know it?”
“No one uses the woods,” he replied.
“We did! Marcellus convinced Gallia to take us that way. I can show you,” I promised. “Gallia would never use it in the dark, but you’ll get down faster.”
Octavia motioned swiftly. “Go. Both of you!”
Juba didn’t protest. He grabbed a torch from a soldier and led me through the press of drunken men and litters to the Temple of Magna Mater. “So where is it?” he demanded. “I don’t see a path.” He handed me the torch, and I picked out the trail we had used every morning.
I had never been in the woods at night, and I was thankful to have Juba behind me, despite his antagonism. “Over here,” I said, lighting the way. I remembered the night that Juba had saved me. “What if he attacks her on the road?”
“With so many soldiers watching the Palatine?”
When we reached the bottom, he took the torch from me and we raced together through a cluster of houses. His scarlet cloak billowed behind him, and the way the moonlight crowned his long hair made him seem more handsome than he was before. We stopped at a house being watched by a group of guards, and Juba approached the first man.
“Has a slave girl entered here?”
“That is none of your business.”
Before the guard could blink, there was a dagger at his throat and the other men withdrew. The torch extinguished itself in a puddle. “Let me repeat my question,” Juba said. “I come from Caesar’s sister Octavia, who would like to know if the Princess of Gaul, her favorite slave, was taken inside.”
The other guards slowly lowered their swords, and the man with the blade to his neck swallowed convulsively. “Yes, she’s inside,” he whispered.
Juba swept past him, and I kept several paces behind as he threw open the doors to Gaius’s house and shouted, “Gaius Tacitus!” There was the sound of shuffling in a chamber off the atrium, and slaves hid behind columns as Juba approached. “Gaius Tacitus!” he shouted again, and this time, Gaius appeared at the end of the atrium. His toga had been discarded, and he was dressed in his thinnest tunic.
“Juba.” He smiled. “And the little princess of Egypt, already budding into a woman.”
“Where is she?”
“Who?”
Juba crossed the room, and immediately, Gaius backed away.
“You mean the Gallic whore?”
There was a moan from inside a chamber off the atrium, and Juba shoved Gaius’s head against the wall. “Gallia!” Juba shouted.
I rushed inside, where Gallia was curled up on the couch. Her pale skin was bared to the moonlight coming through the open shutters, and only her long hair covered her nakedness. “Gallia!” I cried, and she looked up at me with blackened eyes.
“Selene.” She had fought him and lost.
“She’s hurt!” I screamed, and rushed to give Gallia my cloak. There was no sign of the tunic she had worn to the wedding, or the handsome leather shoes that Octavia had given her. “Come,” I told her.
But Juba warned abruptly, “Stay inside!”
We listened to the sound of men scuffling, and when I tried to help Gallia to her feet, I saw that her ankle was swollen.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m so sorry.”
“It isn’t your fault.”
“But I was there. I saw when Livia sent you.”
“And how were you to know what this man would do?”
“Octavia knew! She sent Juba, and if I had told her sooner….”
There was silence outside, and then Juba appeared. “Gallia,” he said, taking her into his arms in a single sweep. She didn’t cry out, despite her bruises.
“Please take me to Magister Verrius,” she whispered.
I followed them out of the chamber and saw Gaius bent double, clutching his stomach. Blood trickled from his mouth and his wounds. I wondered how many women he’d forced himself on, and then how Juba would explain the murder of a senator.
Outside the house, the guards shifted uneasily. “What … what happened?” one of them asked.
“Go inside and find out,” Juba told them darkly. He carried Gallia to a house in a small copse of trees, where smoke coiled from the opening above the atrium. When he reached the door, he didn’t have to knock. Magister Verrius opened it and saw at once what had happened.
“Gallia!”
Her lip began to tremble, and Magister Verrius led the way through his atrium to a woman’s chamber where the scent of lavender hung in the air. Juba placed her gently on a couch, then followed me outside the room while Magister Verrius took Gallia into his arms. I heard her beginning to tell him the story. Then Juba closed the door and we were alone.
“She should have said no to Livia!” I cried.
“She’s a slave. She doesn’t have that privilege.”
“But what if this happens to her again?”
“It probably will.”
I couldn’t understand Juba’s callousness. There was weeping on the other side of the door, along with exclamations of rage from Magister Verrius, who had never raised his voice to us in the ludus. “So how will you explain the senator’s death?”
“I will say he challenged me. Only you were there to see it.”
His dismissiveness riled me. “Don’t you care about what happened tonight?”
“Of course I do, or I would never have risked my life to kill Gaius. But aside from freeing every slave in Rome and joining ranks with a traitor, what would you like me to do?”
I thought of the denarii Alexander had won at the races, but rejected the sum as being too small. Then I touched my mother’s necklace of pink sea pearls. The golden pendant alone could buy Gallia’s freedom; the rest could support her for many years. I unclasped my mother’s last gift to me, then handed it to Juba.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“You deal in old statues and jewels,” I told him. “I want you to trade it for me and buy Gallia’s freedom.” If Gallia was freed, she would never have to obey the commands of a citizen again.
He raised a single brow. “And what makes you think that Octavia will accept it?”
“The denarii from this necklace could feed half the mouths in the Subura.”
“I doubt she needs denarii.”
“Are you refusing?”
He took the necklace and held it up to an olive oil lamp.
