The Prince's Forbidden Flames

The Promise

Princess Daria arrived in Rome on a Tuesday, which Livia learned from Portia and which she received with the stillness of a woman who has had time to prepare and has used it wisely.

She had spent the past three weeks, since Lucian's letter about his father, doing three things. The first was finishing her grain distribution analysis, which had now been formally read by two senators and was being discussed quietly in ways that suggested it might actually change something. The second was teaching Gaius everything she knew about rhetoric and political positioning, because he was going to need it and she had spent enough time being the only one in the family who knew how things worked. The third was making peace — privately, honestly, and without fanfare — with the fact that this might end in the worst of the ways it could end.

She was not resigned. She had chosen, and she was standing by the choice. But she was clear-eyed about it, which was different from being unafraid.

Lucian wrote to her the day after Daria's arrival.

She is here. She is — she is a good person, Livia. I want you to know that I hold this honestly and not simply as a formula. She deserves better than the situation she has been placed in, and I intend to treat her with the respect that requires. That is a truth that runs alongside the other truths, not against them.

The treaty review has been formally scheduled for three weeks from now. My father has personally requested two of his most senior diplomats to assess the eastern clauses. This is not nothing. This is not yet everything.

I am asking you to hold on for three weeks. After that — I will know more. After that, I can speak to you more honestly about what is possible.

Three weeks.

She wrote back:

I am not going anywhere.

She meant it in every sense.

The three weeks were not easy. Rome, in early summer, was a city of heat and rumors, and both intensified around the palace. The news of the treaty review had spread with the speed of information that powerful people find interesting, and with it came speculation — in triclinia and in public baths and in the corridors of the Senate — about what, exactly, the Emperor's son was proposing to change, and why, and for whom.

Livia's name was mentioned, here and there. Carefully, by people who knew only part of the story and were filling in the rest with imagination. She bore this with the composure of a woman who had spent three years enduring worse than gossip, and she did not hide, and she did not apologize.

On the last day of the three weeks, she received not a letter but a visitor.

A palace slave, formally dressed, with a formal request: the Lady Livia Varro was invited, if it pleased her, to take a private meeting with the imperial family at her earliest convenience.

Not Lucian. The imperial family.

Her hands were perfectly steady as she sent back her acceptance.

She dressed carefully — not in the self-effacing plainness she had worn like armor for three years, but in the deep blue stola she had last worn at her father's last good dinner, before everything, when she had been a young woman with a future still in front of her. She did her hair. She wore her mother's earrings.

She arrived at the palace in the late afternoon, when the light was long and golden.

The meeting took place not in the formal reception rooms but in a smaller chamber — the kind where family business was conducted, with comfortable chairs and good wine and the deliberate informality of a setting chosen to allow for real conversation.

The Emperor was there. Lucian. And Princess Daria.

Daria was exactly as Lucian had described: not as Livia had expected. She was composed and dark-haired and possessed of the self-possession of a woman who has known exactly what her life would require of her since she was a child, and had chosen to face it without bitterness. She looked at Livia with the careful, unclouded attention of someone who has decided to deal in honesty.

"I am told," Daria said, after the formal greetings were done, "that you were the one who read the original treaty and identified the clauses that needed revision."

"Prince Lucian identified them," Livia said carefully.

"With significant intellectual contribution from a correspondence I've been made aware of." Daria's expression was unreadable and somehow not unkind. "I respect that. I respect, more generally, people who do the actual work."

Livia met her eyes. "I'm sorry for the position this puts you in."

"The position," Daria said, "was put together by old men with maps before any of us were born. That is not your doing and not mine." She glanced, briefly, at Lucian, and something passed between them that was not love but was a species of honest acknowledgment. "I have spent twenty-six years being a political instrument. I find I am tired of it." She looked back at Livia. "My family is interested in the revised terms. There are provisions in the new framework that are, actually, more favorable to the eastern provinces than the original. My mother is not pleased. My uncle, who has more practical sense than my mother, is paying close attention."

The Emperor had said nothing yet. He watched all three of them with the patience of a man who has overseen a great deal of history and is seeing, in this room, the possibility of a different kind.

"The formal review," he said finally, "concludes with a recommendation next week. I will take that recommendation seriously." He looked at Livia with an assessment that was direct and not unfriendly. "Marcus Varro's case will be reopened. The original evidence will be re-examined properly. This is separate from the treaty and is simply the correct thing to do, which I should have done earlier." He paused. "You have your father's mind."

It was not an apology. It was an acknowledgment, which was more real.

She inclined her head, because she did not trust herself to speak immediately, and because some silences are the right response.

They talked for another hour — practically, carefully, about possibilities rather than promises. Daria asked good questions. The Emperor answered some of them and declined to answer others, which was honest. Lucian said less than anyone and watched Livia with an attention he no longer bothered to disguise.

When she left the palace, the sun was setting over Rome in its extravagant summer way, painting everything gold and rose and the particular color of amber that she would remember for the rest of her life.