Cassia was in the apartment when I entered. I liked that.
I halted in the doorway, startled by the feeling. It was an ease, a relief almost, to find her puttering about, making her notes, sorting out food and utensils, or whatever else she did.
Today she busily decorated a new table under the shelf that held the rudis. She’d set out a spray of flowers, a few candles, and a sketch on a thin board of an older man with a small, wise face.
Cassia didn’t turn when she heard my step. “We had no shrine,” she said, as though feeling the need to explain. “We ought to honor our ancestors as much as any great family does. This is my father.” She touched the picture. “I had a better one of him, but I wasn’t allowed to bring anything with me, so I sketched another. Do you mind?”
She glanced over her shoulder, eyes holding trepidation.
I drew near the small table. “The ancestors can make life hard for us if we don’t appease them. I think it’s the cause of all my misfortune.”
I joked, but only partly. I’d never known my father and barely remembered my mother. However, they could reach from Elysium, or wherever they’d ended up, to torment me if they wished.
“I’ll add your parents,” Cassia said. “What were their names?” She returned to the eating table and took up her ever-present pen, opened her ink jar, and rolled out a bit of papyrus.
“I don’t know.” I edged closer. “Will you add Xerxes instead?”
Cassia’s pen scratched, she not questioning my choice. “You told me about him—close as a brother, you said. What was his full name?”
“Who knows? We took our names when we entered the ludus, and that’s who we became. He was Xerxes. I was Leonidas.”
She looked up at me, the tip of her pen touching her chin. “What was your name before?”
I shrugged. “I don’t remember any other now.”
Cassia cocked her head as she sometimes did when contemplating. “The one thing all of us never forget, deep inside, is our own name.”
That was true. But it was a part of me no one knew, one I’d keep to myself for now.
Courtesans and matrons had teased me trying to learn my name, or they’d demand I tell them. I’d started to claim I didn’t remember, until I almost believed it.
Cassia regarded me for a moment or two longer, then she smiled and let me be.
She took the papyrus slip and set it on the shrine, weighting down one corner of it with a small bronze statuette in the form of a tiny god. A household god, one of the dozens of lesser gods who guided us from day to day. It was good to honor them too.
She returned to her stool and tablets. “What did you learn about Floriana?” she asked, poised to write. “Did you see Priscus?”
I plunked myself down on a stool and I told her all I’d done since leaving this morning—meeting Gallus at Floriana’s, visiting Marcianus, chasing the vigile, what Priscus and I had discussed, and my encounter at the baths. Cassia noted it all down, but she looked up with a gasp as I described being held under the water in the frigidarium.
“Was it Regulus?” she asked immediately.
“No, the hands weren’t right. He’d also find it a cowardly way to settle his anger.”
“Or the vigile?”
“Not right for him either.”
Cassia pondered this. “Unlikely that a complete stranger would try to drown you in a place he could so easily be caught. It must be connected either to you helping Priscus or to Floriana’s death. Perhaps whoever poisoned her believes you know who did it. You were there on the day.”
“Asleep,” I reminded her. “I’m hard to wake.”
“Is that commonly known? They might be terrified that you’d seen them. It was definitely a man who attacked you today?”
“The hands were a man’s, large and hard.”
“Hmm.” Cassia tapped her lip with her stylus. “We have not yet discovered where Floriana was struck down. We should do so.” She closed her tablets, setting them in a neat line, and rose to fetch her palla.
“Now?” I asked in surprise. “Where do you think we need to go?”
“As I said before, we ask questions. Someone must know where it happened. If a man is out to kill you, and if Regulus grows rash enough to denounce you, then we must find the murderer, and quickly.”