How could they do it? Easy as wink. Only one name written on all of the tablets. Or one tablet loaded, like a bad dice. Or quite simply, Vespasian would just announce the preselected name, without looking at the tablets at all.

Pointy-head was still enthusing. “It would be a new departure in the family-but a great honor. We are all absolutely delighted.”

“Does that include Gaia herself?” asked Helena coolly.

“Gaia is passionate about being entered.”

“Little girls do have such quaint ideas.” The Vestals were not Helena’s favorite women, apparently. I was surprised. I thought she would have approved of their honored role and status. “Well, let us hope she is successful,” Helena went on. “Then she will be taken straight to the House of the Vestals and handed into the control of the Pontifex Maximus.”

“Er-quite,” agreed the flamen, belatedly sensing an undercurrent. Presuming, however, that his appeals had been successful, he seemed to be about to leave. Taking a firm hold on Julia, I slid down the corridor and towards another room where I could conceal myself. I glimpsed Pomona’s priest, in his cloak and birchwood prong, with his back to me as he bade Helena farewell; he hid me from her view as I crept past.

I waited until I was sure he had left before I emerged.

As I opened the door behind which I had been hiding, a small determined figure blocked my way. Julia was whipped from my grasp. I groaned, but only quietly.

I was facing a tiny, frail old woman whose black eyes bored like bradawls. A bad conscience-for which I had no damned reason-pinned me to the spot.

“I suppose you have a good explanation,” announced the new arrival fiercely, “why you failed to come home for the little one’s birthday?” I did have. Famia’s funeral rites, such as they were, for the few scraps that had been left of him by the lion: an explanation, though not good. “And I do know what happened to Famia-though I had to hear it from dear Anacrites!”