away Tullius’s pathetic body. “Take her to a chamber,” he ordered one bunch. “Fetch my physician. She’ll have the best of care.”
“No.” My snarl made the princeps of the Roman Empire stop and regard me coldly. “Send for Nonus Marcianus, from the Aventine. He’s the best physician in the world.”
Nero continued to stare at me then he gave me a nod and snapped another order at his slaves.
The shaved-headed man reappeared as more guards surrounded Nero. “You,” the man said to me. “Bring her.”
He turned and marched out of the room, not bothering to see if I’d follow.
Chapter 25
The shaved-headed man took me to a room with a sleeping couch, hangings screening it from the passageway outside it. It was a small chamber with plainer decorations than any I’d seen in this domus.
Cassia was limp and gray-cheeked by the time I laid her down, her breathing shallow, lips blue. I knew she’d not last the night.
The wait for Marcianus stretched. Gallus found the wine cups, saving them just as a servant had gone in to clear the table. He’d brought all three, two still brimming, the third half-empty.
The hapless servant, a slave whose job it was to deliver food and drink to whomever in the palace required it, was hauled before the shaved-headed man and beaten. From his sobbed confession, it was clear he’d had no idea the wine had been poisoned.
His story was that Tullius had told him guests awaited Nero in the long antechamber and they should be served wine at once. Tullius had inspected the glasses once they’d been on the tray, turning his back to the servant to sniff them. He’d wanted to make certain the guests had the best wine, not inferior stuff, Tullius had explained.
I believed the slave. Tullius would have given the command in his offhand way, and the servant would have had hurried to obey without question.
“Leave him,” I shouted at the shaved-headed man. “No one else should suffer for Tullius. You should for not noticing he was an assassin.”
The slave was released, and the shaved-headed man made himself scarce.
Cassia should not suffer for Tullius either, or for my slowness. Tullius had been too friendly, too ingratiating. I was used to men excited to meet a famous gladiator, and I’d taken his fawning as truth.
He’d had the height and build of the man who’d attacked me in the street and again in the bath. Avitus had been too spindly—Gallus, Celnus, or Kephalos too feeble. The middle-class man who toadied to Priscus also was too soft to be my attacker.
I’d also suspected the man who’d purchased Floriana’s lupinarius, but he was probably an elderly patrician who lived in a villa outside Rome and never bothered to look at his own properties in the city. I’d never thought of Tullius.
Cassia must have known—she’d been adamant about something when we’d left Priscus’s house tonight. Our meeting with Avitus had overshadowed it, and she’d assured me it would keep. If I’d made her tell me her thoughts …
I held her hand, which was too cold. If she died, what would happen to me?
Our benefactor would simply send me another slave, I knew. But never one like Cassia. She was too unique to be discarded and replaced like a broken amphora.
Marcianus arrived at last. I heard his hurried conversation with Gallus and then the medicus was beside me, his thin frame and large nose familiarly drab in this grandeur. Marcia had accompanied him, she almost completely shrouded in her plain brown cloak.
Marcianus sniffed the glasses, then dipped his finger into one and delicately tasted a drop of the wine inside.
“Subtle,” he said under his breath. “How long between the time she drank and the time she fell?”
I couldn’t speak. I didn’t know, in any case. The events had blurred, our haste through the city to the palace, our tedious wait for Nero to send for us, ending with my fury as I fought Tullius. His blood still stained my tunic.
“The fourth hour of night had been called,” Gallus said. “But not the fifth.”
“She didn’t drink too much. That is good.” Marcianus’s thin hand landed on my shoulder. “I’ll do what I can, Leonidas.”
I understood that Marcianus expected me to leave while he doctored Cassia, but I refused. I remained stubbornly next to the bed, only stepping aside enough to let him work.
He purged Cassia, holding her over a basin in Marcia’s hands while Cassia heaved up all she had in her stomach. Marcianus laid her back down