Daughters of Rome by Kate Quinn Read Free Book Online

had kicked in the heads of no less than four grooms. What a ruckus in the family that had been.
    Diana stepped back, chewing absently on a piece of straw. “Who’s driving, Xerxes?”
    “A Greek boy. Won a few races at the Circus Flaminius. Got good hands.”
    “The bays run too?” More than one team of horses could run for each color faction.
    “Aye. Under Tarquin.”
    “He’ll win, if those buggardly Blues don’t foul him.”
    “Diana!” Marcella broke into the litany. Uninterrupted, Diana would go on all day. “Cornelia sent me down for you. She’s going mad trying to make everything perfect.”
    “Go on with her, Lady,” Xerxes grunted at Diana. “Take your pretty sandals out of the muck.”
    Diana came forward, catching one of the gray stallions by the nose and dragging his head down. Her arms looked too slim to hold a big horse, but the stallion’s broad nose dropped under her hand, and the baleful gaze was caught by a pair of cloudy blue-green eyes that had half the men in Rome stammering like schoolboys. “Keep steady out there,” Diana told the horse. “It’s a wild time once the flag drops.”
    The stallion chuffed against her hand, scarlet ribbons fluttering in his braided mane just like the red ribbons plaited into Diana’s hair. Marcella tugged at her elbow again, and the grooms ran forward with the red-dyed harness. Behind stood the racing chariot, slung light between two gilded wheels, crested by a fire god’s head with writhing scarlet snakes for hair. The charioteer stood ready, a skinny dark-eyed boy barely older than Diana, and she stared over her shoulder at him as Marcella hauled her out through the stable doors.
    “Your eyes are about to fall out of your head.” Stopping to pluck a few wisps of straw from Diana’s hair. “Have you finally fallen in love? Lollia will be so pleased.”
    “I’m not in love with him.” Diana brushed that thought away just as she brushed away Marcella’s hands. “I want to be him.”
    No doubt. Plenty of people liked to hiss rumors about Diana’s reputation, but Marcella didn’t believe that her youngest cousin haunted the stables for the charioteers. Plenty of fine ladies might flop on their backs for a famous driver, but not Diana. At a Lupercalia faction party last year, Marcella had watched the star charioteer for the Blues trail his fingers along Diana’s neck and ask her if she wouldn’t like a walk in the moonlit gardens—and Diana had fixed him with a blank blue-green stare and said, “I wouldn’t walk out of a burning house with a man who steered a turn as badly as you.” Not a girl with hayrick tumbles on her mind.
    If Diana had a mind. Marcella had never been entirely sure. How much did horses think?
    Diana glared at her as they started up the broad path away from the faction stables. “You didn’t wear red.”
    “It’s pink. Sort of red.”
    “But there’s no pink faction!”
    No, not much of a mind there.
    They returned to the Cornelii box, where Diana dropped a kiss on the head of her absentminded father. As beautiful as his daughter, Marcella thought, and just as crazy. Nicknamed Paris by the besotted women of Rome, after the prince whose pretty face won him Helen of Troy. Diana’s father wasn’t so interested in causing trouble as that Paris, though. In fact, he wasn’t interested in anything but sculpting marble. What really annoys the family is how good he is. Even now he sat ignoring anyone who tried to talk to him and making sketches for his statues. “Good face,” he told Cornelia’s startled centurion, Densus or whatever his name was. “You might make me a good Vulcan. Maybe a Neptune if you had a beard. How long would it take you to grow a beard? Profile, please.”
    “Um,” the centurion stammered. “I’m on duty.”
    “You can be on duty in profile, can’t you? Turn around.”
    Diana was looking at the centurion and the row of silent Praetorians at the wall behind him. “What are they doing