Lazy, useless girl; you’ve made me late,” Lady Lydia scolded, her mouth pinched tight like an anus.

“Your pardon, my lady,” I said, curtseying to the ground and bowing my head until it touched my knee. I knew better than to meet her eyes until she had spent her spleen.

“Not worth the space you take up on the floor. Never at hand when I need you, are you? And precious little good when you are here.”

I said nothing and held motionless, using my dancer’s strength to hold the awkward pose. Her moods were mercurial, and I’d long ago learned that the quickest way to soften them was to offer the appearance of utter submission. She might be even more quickly mollified if I allowed my muscles to tremble, but pride had its limits. I would not cower. I instead imagined myself to be a painted marble statue, a human shape created to be perfectly, unnaturally still.

“Gods, girl, get up,” she finally said, and from the corner of my eye I saw the impatient waving of her hand. “Fix my hair. Hermina has made a bird’s nest of it.”

Safely out of sight behind Lady Lydia’s head, Hermina rolled her eyes and gave me a sour look. She’d been taking care of Lady Lydia since my lady was a baby, and while not intimidated by her tantrums, she was also jealous of her mistress’s care.

“Yes, my lady,” I said, and rushed to do her bidding. Lady Lydia was Sygarius’s wife, and mother to his two small daughters; he was still waiting for a son. It might be a long wait, given Lady Lydia’s reluctance to admit her husband to her bed; her affections were completely taken by her daughters, and she didn’t much care for men to begin with. “So . . . crude,” she often complained. “Their bodies have none of the soft beauty of a woman’s.”

Arranging Lady Lydia’s hair was as close as I ever came to physical human contact, and even so I was careful to keep my fingers from her scalp, touching only the hair, the comb, the pins. My nimble fingers quickly undid Hermina’s work—truly, the old nursemaid had little talent for styling hair; a braid looped there? What had she been thinking?—and I combed out Lady Lydia’s dyed red locks. She insisted on the color, though it did not flatter her skin and the dyes left her hair dull and dry. Perhaps it was part of her plan to keep Sygarius at bay.

“No need to go too fancy,” she said. “And use one of my lesser diadems. It’s not as if I need to impress barbarians. Why Sygarius insists I welcome them I do not know. They’re nothing but mercenaries. Entertain them in our home? Why? We’ll have to burn the linens when they leave. And you!” Lady Lydia turned on her seat, the abrupt movement pulling the braid I’d been working on out of my hand. “Given the chance, they’d have you bent over a couch for each to take their turn, with no thought for destruction of our property. Which would be a great pity; Sygarius has so been looking forward to your initiation.” Her gaze drifted down to my breasts, unbound beneath the yellow linen gown. “As have I.”

She suddenly reached up and fondled my breast. Startled, I gasped and jerked back.

“Shh,” Lady Lydia cooed, and gently pinched my nipple two, three, four times, until it hardened between her fingertips and I felt an answering, unwelcome tingle in my sex. She slid her palm over the fullness of my breast, and then cupped it from beneath, weighing it in her hand. “Your last menses, when did they finish?”

“A few days ago,” I said, my voice gone hoarse in shock at her touch, both because it was forbidden and because I’d never thought she wanted me that way. I’d heard stories of her predilections among the servants, of course, but she’d never shown any sexual interest me. I had thought she was content to leave my body to her husband.

She gave my breast a final caress and released it. “You haven’t grown for five months?”

“My sixth and final measuring is to be at the full moon.” Sygarius had sworn not to touch me—not so much as a hand upon my cheek—until I was a woman full grown, who had gone a half-year without gaining in height. I had once thought this a testament to his gentleness, but that was before my growth had slowed and my breasts had bloomed to their full flower, and he had begun to whisper to me of the pleasures we would share. I had realized then that it was not gentleness that made him wait, but an inhuman self-control. He was aroused by the anticipation of our joining, and had been savoring the years of waiting as if they were extended foreplay.

And then, two months ago, the “lessons” had started.

I was yet untouched in body, but my mind: ah, my mind! I had been taught to crave that which previously I had not guessed to exist.

At the thought of the lessons, a warm rush of fullness filled my sex. I tightened my thighs, and felt a throb as my nether gates closed on an empty passageway.

“The full moon is three weeks hence.” Lady Lydia tapped her lower lip with her fingertip. “Hermina! Measure Nimia tonight.”

“My lady?” I dared to question.

“The summer solstice is in only two weeks. It would be a pity to wait until after; it is such a propitious night. Of course there are so many arrangements yet to be made . . .”

“My lady?” Arrangements? What arrangements? If she was speaking of the taking of my virginity, what arrangements could there be other than a bed and Sygarius, cock at the ready?

She ignored me, and devoted her attention to selecting bracelets. I cast my eyes to Hermina, only to find her studiously looking elsewhere. So she knew what was going to happen, and was no more willing to speak of it than Lady Lydia.

Trepidation ran across my skin. I did not like the sound of “arrangements.” It hinted of props and planning and other people. For all the perversities that I had seen in my lessons, I had still assumed that Sygarius would enjoy me privately, in the standard manner. I almost demanded that Lady Lydia tell me more, but my years as a slave caught my tongue before the words could leave my lips. It was clear she did not wish to explain, and insisting would earn me only punishment.

It’s my life they are deciding, a rebellious spirit inside me complained. I was not born a slave. They should not hold secrets from me about my own body, my own future.

Dangerous thoughts. My body was not my own.

I picked up the fallen braid and went back to work on Lady Lydia’s hair, trying to bury my worries . . . and my rebellion.

“Who are these barbarians who’ve descended upon us?” I asked. Thoughts of the young wolf were an easy distraction from whatever was going to happen on the summer solstice.

“Franks. One of the tribes of them, anyway. Salians from . . .” Lady Lydia waved her hand in the air. “North or northeast of us. Somewhere beyond the Rhine River. It’s all uncivilized wilds out there. Long hair and beards, and gods only know how they smell, though I suppose we’ll know soon enough.” She shuddered.

“They’re hired soldiers, you say?”

“Yes. Lawless mercenaries. But Childeric calls himself a king, and he has his princeling son Clovis with him.”

The young wolf—it could be no other. I could feel the rightness of that. I conjured his face before me, and the moment when our eyes had locked. A trembling echo of the premonition washed through me again, and I felt my breasts swell, my sex tighten yet again. I knew: this princeling, this Clovis, would have not only my soul, but my body as well.

Impossible, I told myself. For Sygarius’s I am. The weight of the golden torc lay heavy round my neck. I was his treasure, which he’d been waiting to plunder for the nine years he’d owned me. We were so close, now, to that time of final consummation: he would never give me up, not without taking his full pleasure from me first.

But again I saw Clovis’s cold, assessing eyes, and the width of his shoulders. His sun-streaked light brown hair, and the short beard he wore, so unlike the clean-shaven faces of Roman men. I imagined Clovis’s narrow hips with those taut buttocks . . . imagined those buttocks beneath my hands, those hips between my thighs, as he took me for my first time. He, barbarian, instead of Sygarius.

Sygarius, my master. Sygarius, Dux of Soissons, ruler of the last province of the fallen Western Roman Empire. Sygarius, who had groomed me to be his concubine since he took me as a war prize from a vanquished Visigoth foe.

For years I had imagined being bedded by Sygarius—even before the lessons—and both longed for and dreaded the day. He was woven into all my fantasies of what it was to join one body to another: to be a female, penetrated by a male. To be touched, explored, licked, taken, used. To lie with him sprawled across the sheets, covered in sweat, the wet evidence of our joining smeared across my thigh.

And yet today, with one gaze, I had seen another in that role.

How could there be any other?

The two possible futures stretched in front of my inner gaze, possibilities weaving in and out, crossing and parting like the strands of Lady Lydia’s hair in my hands. One face turned into another; one body, tall, young, and lithe, turned shorter, stronger, darker. My limbs tangled with one man’s, then another’s, our bodies rolling against and over each other like fighting dogs, until I didn’t know who I lay with even in my own imaginings. My breath came in short pants and I struggled for air, feeling those bonds of fate binding round my chest like the arms of a man who would never release that which was his.

“Splendid, Nimia!” Lady Lydia said, and clapped her hands together. The sharp sound brought me back to myself, and I looked down at my handiwork: an intricate arrangement of braids, false hairpieces, and jeweled diadem in a style I’d never seen before—and would likely never see again, for I had no memory of how I’d achieved it.

Lady Lydia held a silver mirror this way and that, taking in the structure atop her head. “Too impressive for barbarians, to be sure.” She made a moue at her reflection. “But perhaps they should know what a true queen looks like. They might not think more of Sygarius for having such a comely wife, but certainly they would think less of him should I appear haggard and slovenly. Not that they could tell the difference; gods only know what their standards of female grooming are, assuming they have any at all.”

“Do you wish me to attend you to the dining hall?” I asked, and caught myself moving my fingertips in spirals down the outside of my thighs. It was a nervous habit, tracing the tattoos that were hidden by my gown. I wanted to go into the great dining hall and see Clovis again.

“I can’t think why I should need you,” Lady Lydia said, standing and brushing out her skirts. “I do hope they leave in the morning; I see no reason for them to stay longer.”

My hands stilled, disappointment a sudden weight upon my shoulders. He might leave without my having seen him again.

“Hermina,” Lady Lydia said, pausing in the doorway on her way out, and inclining her head toward me. “Measure.”