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Only when Princess was settled did Claudia dare to pet her, running one hand over the fur on her back. Her pointy ears twitched as she began to purr – a low, rumbling sound that soothed Claudia’s soul.

The creature was well-fed and well-groomed, as far as she could tell, for Claudia had little experience with big cats. It spoke to the prince’s better nature, that his animals were so well cared for.

Claudia dared to stroke her under the chin. Princess purred louder, enthusiastically rubbing the sides of her face against Claudia’s hand, then lowered her head onto the bedspread and drifted off to sleep.

Claudia didn’t get the impression that the lynx had been trained to assassinate her in her sleep with a single bite to the throat as forewarned, but it would be a novel way for the prince to murder her, if he wished, if not a little obvious.

As had become her new evening tradition, she sat before the shield and used the supernatural reflection of Minerva’s magic mirror to check in on her list of suspects. Tonight, she began with the prince.

‘Show me Darius.’

He was lying on his back in his bed in the east wing. There were people swarming around him, talking and cleaning and presenting him with various objects, playing instruments and telling jokes as if to cheer him up, but he appeared to be pondering something, toying lightly with the pendant he wore around his neck.

The prince seemed troubled by something: his missing knife, perhaps. Claudia watched him for a time, hoping to catch him in the act of something, but he soon expelled his servants and retired to bed alone.

Claudia pulled the weapon out from the chest it had been hidden in, swaddled in a bundle of cloth. She tilted it back and forth in the light, examining its fine carving of a lightning bolt. It was ornate, much like the shield. A gods-blessed object imbued with unknown power.

She caught her own reflection in the blade and suddenly feared that Jupiter might be using it to spy on her. If Minerva could speak to her through a shield, there was no reason he couldn’t spy through the blade of a knife. She wrapped it back up and stashed it away.

Again, that nagging thought – that it didn’t make sense. The prince hadn’t even arrived in Rome when she’d been attacked at the Pantheon with what appeared to be this same knife. How could it be in his possession?

She suspected that he was being set up somehow, yet that was impossible too. It was as Gia said: who had known she planned to search his rooms that day?

Claudia attempted to spy on Marcellus again. She was expecting the vision to be infuriatingly blank, as it had been on the previous occasions she’d tried, but with a sudden, surprising pop, a blurred, shaky image appeared on the shield, revealing her cousin surrounded by trees.

It took her a moment to register what she was seeing. He was in the wild forests of Britannia, she discerned, recognizing one of the stone circles for which the isle was known. And he was in leagues with hundreds of soldiers. No, not in leagues – at the helm.

He’d gone there to track down the missing legion, she presumed, and yet no one had said a word to her.

Once again, it didn’t bode well for her reign.

Her cousin paused, his eyes catching on something tangled in one of the bushes that blocked their path. He pulled it out, freeing it from the thorns, and held out the torn red material for his men to see.

‘A soldier’s cloak,’ he said. ‘We’re moving in the right direction. We must keep going.’

‘Yes, general,’ said some of the men, saluting.

Marcellus was a general now? She hadn’t given permission for such a promotion.

‘Aquinas says we must attack any heathen villages we come across,’ he said. ‘Leave no bough unburned, no well unpolluted. We shall have vengeance, in the name of Jupiter.’

‘Ao, Jupiter!’ sang his men, cheerfully.

The shield gave another pop and ended abruptly, and she could not seem to get her cousin to appear again.

Someone was trying to hide his activities from her sight, to keep her out of the picture. Claudia had not been informed – she was deliberately being kept in the dark… and now she realized why: General Aquinas wanted to push ahead with his plan to raze the villages and drive out the barbarians, whether she approved or not.

Marcellus was positioning himself to seize power, using his influence with the military to gain support, but at least his extended vacation meant she had one less foe to worry about for now. He was overseas. He couldn’t possibly have hidden the knife in the prince’s rooms.

Claudia next turned to Damocles, who was ambling around the gardens. He looked tired, world-weary, ducking into his own chambers to write a letter, though she could not make out what it said.

Meanwhile, Hieronymus was complaining about her to a couple of senators in a local taberna, implying that ‘the Persians will be taking over’ if she had anything to do with it.

‘She’s too soft,’ he was saying. ‘Too young, too sheltered. Her father had many failings, but he was rarely too merciful. He tended to play on the safe side. Kill first, ask questions later… Ahh, I miss him.’

His companions hummed in agreement.

‘This prince will run rings around her. It will spell disaster, mark my words. Just wait until your neighbours are praying to Mithras.’