My need to see him proved irresistible.

I moved silently through the shadowed garden of the central peristyle courtyard. Dusk had come, turning the sky above to deep blue, while still leaving light enough to see my way. The garden was surrounded on all sides by a colonnade, and beyond the columns were the open doorways of the public rooms of the villa. The largest of these, the richly decorated garden room, spilled yellow lamplight and music into the evening air each time a servant pushed past the heavy curtain over the doorway.

As I came closer, the deep notes of male laughter made raucous by drink, and voices slipping from Latin into a Germanic tongue that I felt I could almost understand, stirred up dark memories of a time before Sygarius; a time when my mother and I were prisoners of a band of Visigoths.

Prisoners, or family members? It depended on your point of view. My mother hadn’t wanted to call herself wife to Groudan; hadn’t wanted to share his bed. But as she’d taught me, you made your choices. Wife to Groudan, or slave to every woman in the band and a pair of open thighs to every man. Choices.

“Take full advantage of every choice you’re given, Nimia,” she’d told me. “Women get precious few of them in this life. You make your choice and then squeeze everything you can from it.”

I didn’t know if she had lived through that day when Sygarius’s army had defeated Groudan and several allied Visigoth bands. I liked to believe she had escaped, and had found a hidden enclave of our original people, the Phanne. When I was younger I had pretended to myself that I, too, would escape the Romans and find the Phanne, and that she would be waiting for me among them.

Those fantasies now felt so very long ago, and my mother almost like a vision from a dream, half remembered. But the guttural, Germanic voices of Childeric’s men brought her back to me. I could see her face half-lit by the fire, her hair a long, smooth fall of onyx like mine, but her eyes darker. She had been one of a hundred stray seeds planted in Burgundy by the prick of Attila the Hun, while my father had been a tall, pale Celt. I had her golden skin and small stature, but my body was riper, more lush; my mouth more full, and my eyes were a strange honey color rimmed in reddish brown. I’d been told that when my passions ran high they turned an unsettling, fiery copper.

Sygarius had told me it was my eyes that made him pluck me from amid the captured.

Another burst of laughter came from the garden room and I stopped, my bare feet holding me in place. I knew how drunken men, barbarian warriors especially, could treat a woman they found alone.

I should not be out here. I should be telling bedtime stories to the little girls, or practicing my dance, or writing a new piece of music. Gods, even helping Hermina with mending. Anything safe and tucked away.

A stream of servants carrying flagons of wine and platters of food marched like ants from the kitchens to the garden room, their figures appearing and disappearing behind the columns. They reminded me where I was: the country estate of a great dux, and under his full protection. I was not in a clay-floored farmhouse, watching from the smoky shadows as large men grew wild and thoughtless, and any woman who valued her cunny tried to disappear into the walls.

And these “barbarians” were a king, a prince, and their men, and were given at least the appearance of respect from Sygarius.

Still, better not to be found alone in a dark garden.

The servants with their platters and pitchers gave me an idea. I hurried to the kitchens, where Cook put a heavy flagon in my hands and sent me off to the banquet. I sometimes helped serve at table, so no one questioned my pitching in to do so now.

My heart sped up as I approached the garden room, a flush warming my cheeks in anticipation of seeing Clovis. Would he notice me?

If he did notice me, what would he think? Would he feel any of what I did? Would he find me beautiful?

It was only as I set foot over the threshold of the room, my slave-bare feet feeling the warmth of the marble floor that was heated from below, that I remembered that what he would see was a slave.

He was a prince. I was a world beneath him.

I ducked my chin to hide my face, and tipped the flagon to fill the first goblet I saw, held in the hand of one of the older Franks. The man reclined awkwardly on a couch, his napkin forgotten on the floor and a dribble of sauce on his tunic; he looked unfamiliar with the Roman way of dining, and painfully self-conscious.

The wine would help with that. I filled his goblet to the brim and earned a brief flash of grateful eyes.

Three wide couches, each large enough to hold three people half reclining, formed a U around several small tables loaded with foodstuffs. The open end of the U allowed servants to come and go, replacing dishes and filling cups. There were three such triads of couches set up in the garden room tonight, although a quick glance showed that half the Frankish men either stood or sat on the couch edges, wide-eyed and uneasy amid the mosaic-covered walls and Roman nobles.

Not Clovis.

His back was to me, but there was no mistaking that hair and form. He lounged with loose limbs at the next triad over, propped on his left elbow as was correct, and I heard the low, melodious tones of his voice as he said something I could not make out to Lady Lydia, lounging opposite. She laughed, too much, and her eyes were shining. She shifted, allowing a view down into her ample cleavage.

So much for her hatred of barbarians. Or of men, for that matter.

A spike of jealousy stabbed through me.

“Little bird,” I heard a familiar voice say in soft surprise, calling me by his pet name.

I turned and looked into the deep, dark eyes of Sygarius. He leaned half upright against cushions, at a right angle to the man on the neighboring couch, who must be King Childeric. Although they could not be far apart in age, the contrast between the two men was striking enough to make me wonder how they could ever be allies. Childeric was all that was wild and unrestrained, from his checkered tunic to his florid face and thick belly; from his straggly, uncombed hair to his chest-length beard. Sygarius was all that was controlled and crisply civilized, with his bare face and short black hair, his thickly muscled body, which showed no hint of fat, and the pristine folds of his long tunic and toga, devoid of ornament.

Sygarius made a slight gesture with his goblet, and I rushed to fill it. As I righted the flagon, I dared to look again into his eyes, and saw the faint question there. Why are you here? he seemed to be asking.

In a panic that he would guess my reason, I did the only thing I could think of. I softened my gaze on him and then made a subtle kissing motion with my mouth. For you. I’m here for you, my love.

His eyes crinkled at the corners. Ah, he liked that.

I felt as much as saw his warm gaze sweep over my body, and as I looked at his muscled body in return and thought of what would soon happen between us, I fretted that there was something wrong with me, that I should look twice at the young Frankish prince. It was insane to risk the regard of a powerful man like Sygarius, especially when the object of my obsession was little more than an unproven boy.

It was worse than insane. It was stupid.

As I moved on with my flagon, I heard Childeric blow out a breath and say, “Where did you find that one?”

Sygarius chuckled. “Her? A gift from the gods.”

“I’ve never seen a fig so ripe for the plucking.”

My master’s reply was gentle, but the more deadly for that. “A harvest that is mine alone. I will tolerate no thieves in my garden.”

Childeric was silent a moment, but then he, too, chuckled. “Nor would I, my friend. Some fruit is too fine for sharing. But you won’t begrudge me the joy of gazing upon it.”

“Not at all.”

A flame of anger kindled to life inside me. So Childeric would gaze upon me as if I were a pretty flower, unthinking and unfeeling, and Sygarius did not mind. I, his favorite, was to be dangled like a honeyed date in front of a hungry man; leered at, salivated over. Why? Did it amuse Sygarius?

I flashed a look at him, and he beckoned me back with a tilt of his head.

“Lotus,” he said. It was a one-word command to enact a short play that Terix, I, and a few other slaves had been practicing. My lips parted, my gaze skimming over the two dozen people in the room, and then landing on Clovis.

The only thing worse than to be a slave was to be an actress or a prostitute, though the two were assumed to go hand in hand, so what difference did it make?

“Is there a problem?” Sygarius asked softly.

I shook my head in quick denial and smiled, large and false. “I shall hunt down Terix, my lord.”

I fled from the hall.

Ah, gods. I had thought myself so clever, sneaking into the banquet with my flagon of wine, hoping to catch the eye of Clovis. Hoping he would share a glance with me, and feel an echo of that certainty that had stolen my breath and woken my body.

But he had not so much as looked my way.

And I had gained nothing but the promise of humiliation.