Senator Tullus did not go quietly.
This was not surprising — men who have spent twenty years building their position on a specific set of arrangements rarely accept the dissolution of those arrangements with grace. What was surprising was the specificity of his response and the direction it came from.
The night before the case review's first formal hearing, a rumor began to move through Rome's better houses: the Varro case reopening was politically motivated. It was, the rumor suggested, not a genuine judicial review but a favor arranged by the Crown Prince for a woman he had taken an interest in — which not only invalidated the integrity of the review but raised questions about Lucian's judgment and the independence of imperial processes.
It was a clean attack. It did not need to be true to be damaging. It only needed to be plausible, and in Rome, anything involving power and love and the intersection of the two was always plausible.
Livia heard it from Portia at breakfast, which meant it had been moving since the previous evening and she had twelve hours of lost time.
She sat very still for a moment. Then she did what she had learned, over this particular summer, to do when the ground shifted: she assessed, she identified the weakest point, and she acted.
The weakest point in Tullus's attack was that it required Lucian's involvement in the review to be undocumented and improperly arranged. In fact, the review had been co-sponsored by Senator Corvus, filed through proper channels, and had the documented support of the emperor's own administrative endorsement. The suggestion that it was a personal favor fell apart at contact with the paper trail.
But paper trails required people to read them, and rumors moved faster than documents.
Livia wrote to Corvus. She wrote to the legal scholar whose work on the original prosecution had been building toward exactly this moment. She wrote to Daria — a single line: The rumor is Tullus. We need the eastern delegation to make a statement today.
And then she did something she had not done in three years.
She went to the Forum.
Not the Senate — she had no standing there. But the Forum, the open civic heart of Rome where any citizen could speak and be heard, where merchants and scholars and senators' wives moved in the same space and information traveled as fast as conversation.
She went to the Forum and she found three men she knew — old allies of her father, men who had stayed quiet through the disgrace because they had to but had never been indifferent — and she told them what was happening, precisely and without drama, and she asked them to talk.
They talked.
By midday, the counter-narrative was in motion: not a rumor this time but specifics. The co-sponsorship documents. The proper filing. The procedural record of the original prosecution that Corvus had quietly obtained, which showed with documentary clarity the specific ways in which Tullus had influenced the proceedings twelve years ago. Not alleged. Documented.
Daria's statement arrived through official eastern diplomatic channels by the second hour after midday: a formal expression of the eastern provinces' interest in and support for the integrity of Roman judicial processes, and their confidence that the current review was being conducted with the full independence and rigor that such processes required.
It was a masterpiece of diplomatic language that said, in effect: we are watching, and we know what is happening, and we are not impressed.
Tullus attempted a response and found that the ground had shifted under him in the time it had taken him to compose it.
That evening, Lucian found out what she had done.
He wrote:
You went to the Forum.
She wrote back:
I was a citizen of Rome before I was anyone's scandal. I behaved like one.
A longer pause than usual. Then:
I need you to know that I have never in my life admired anyone more than I admire you at this specific moment.
She read it twice. Allowed herself to feel it fully.
Then she wrote:
I know. Now help me finish this.