Empress of the Seven Hills by Kate Quinn Read Free Book Online Page B

and his gift for shaping it.
    “I wish I had a talent,” Sabina confided to a suspicious-eyed bust of the old emperor Domitian. Even an awkward talent like sculpting marble, or Aunt Diana’s passion for training horses—it would still make life simpler. You’d
know
what the gods intended you to be. It was just a matter of clearing any obstacles out of the way, and getting on with it.
    She’d wanted to smack Vix that day at the races a few weeks ago. Anyone with eyes in their head could see what he was supposed to be, and instead he wasted his time skulking around alleys, picking fights, and kissing the wrong girls.
    A deep voice sounded behind her. “Vibia Sabina.”
    “Publius Aelius Hadrian.” She turned, aping his formal tones just a little. “Wait, hold still!”
    “What?” he frowned, his broad hand twitching the folds of his toga.
    “Hand out—there. Raised up, declamatory. Now, hold it.” Sabina raised her voice. “Uncle Paris, come sketch him for your next statue.
Perfect Roman Senator
.”
    Hadrian dropped the declamatory hand. “I see you like a joke, Vibia Sabina.”
    “Don’t you?”
    He ignored the question, looking at Uncle Paris, whose eyes were trained on a minute crack in his marble block. “Uncle, you said?”
    “Another cousin, technically,” Sabina said. “Father’s related to half of Rome, and Calpurnia to the other half. Everyone’s my cousin.”
    Including the Emperor—and that, Sabina knew, was the reason Publius Aelius Hadrian stood, stilted and dutiful, trying to make conversation with a silly girl who liked a joke. Soon after Vinalia, he’d decided to start courting her. Sabina couldn’t decide if it was funny or exasperating. She’d never had a more reluctant suitor in her life.
    “You’ve received the gift I sent yesterday?” he said after another pause.
    “The stag from your hunt? Yes, my stepmother is very grateful. We’ll have venison for days.”
    “I will send more. I hunt weekly, but I do not need so much game for myself.”
    “Then why do you hunt weekly?” Sabina eyed his immaculate hands, his toga without so much as an ink spot. “I’d have thought hunting too dirty for you.”
    “On the contrary.”
    Another silence fell.
    “You’ve commissioned something, I suppose.” Hadrian gestured around the studio, boredom suppressed in every word. “A bust of your father?”
    “In a sense.” Sabina indicated the little figure in rosy marble: a man dropped to one knee, tendons corded through his arms and down his neck, one shoulder twisted under the weight of a perfect sphere.
    “Atlas. Bowed under the weight of the heavens.” Hadrian peered at the carved face, its noble nose and broad forehead, the mouth compressed in an agony of effort. “Is that your father’s face?”
    “Very good,” said Sabina. “It’s a surprise Calpurnia commissioned for him. Her way of reminding him not to work too hard.”
    “She is a fine wife,” Hadrian approved. “A pearl among women.”
    “After what my mother put him through, my father was due a pearl.”
    Hadrian cocked his head at that.
    Sabina gave a bland blink of her lashes. “You’ve come for a bust?”
    “Yes. A gift for the Emperor. I thought to have him carved as Aeneus.”
    “Better Alexander. Trajan would adore to conquer the world.”
    “Alexander then. The world at his feet.” Hadrian bent to examine the little Atlas again, and Sabina saw the light in his eyes. “Your uncle Paris, he must have studied the Polykleitos school of thought? Action and inaction, perfectly expressed here. Have you ever seen the Polykleitos
Doryphorus
? I’ve seen sketches, but—” Hadrian pulled himself up. “Forgive me, Vibia Sabina. Of course this is of no interest to—”
    “How do you know what interests me?” said Sabina. “You may have been showering me with flowers and dead deer for a few weeks now, but we’ve never had a single interesting conversation.”
    “Naturally a girl does not study the