The wedding was in September.
Rome in September had a quality of light that belonged entirely to itself — the summer's extravagance softening into something more considered, the heat still present but gentler, the city settling into the particular golden mood of a place that has survived another summer and intends to enjoy the autumn.
The ceremony was in the temple of Juno, which was tradition, attended by the Senate and the diplomatic community and a significant portion of Rome that had lined the streets since dawn. It was formal and elaborate and correct in every detail, as imperial weddings were required to be, and Livia moved through it with the composure she had been practicing for thirty years and also with something underneath the composure that was entirely new: she was happy.
Not managed happiness. Not the survival-flavored contentment of someone who has learned to find enough in reduced circumstances. The real thing — the kind that expands rather than contracts, that makes the world larger rather than smaller, that is not threatened by complexity or reality because it was built from both.
Her father walked with her to the temple doors.
He was wearing his old senator's toga, which had been retrieved from storage and which fit him still, if loosely. He was going to be reinstated to the Senate in the spring — Corvus was managing the process — but today he was simply her father, walking his daughter to a door.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Since approximately three months ago," she said, which made him laugh.
He kissed her cheek. She went through the door.
Lucian was waiting at the altar with the stillness of a man who has waited for something long enough to know how to be still for it. He watched her come toward him through the flower-scattered temple, through the assembled senators and ambassadors and eastern delegates and all the formidable apparatus of Roman ceremony, and she could see from across the space that the only thing he was actually seeing was her.
The ceremony was conducted by the Pontifex Maximus with the appropriate solemnity. The vows were ancient and formal, as vows had been for six hundred years. Livia spoke hers clearly, looking at Lucian's face, aware that every person in the temple was watching and not caring because she was saying true things.
Gaius was in the family gallery, wearing new robes, trying not to cry. He was not succeeding.
Portia, seated three rows back, was already crying and making no attempt to hide it.
Daria, present through the official diplomatic invitation extended to all foreign delegations, watched from the eastern section with an expression that was composed and not unkind and, Livia thought, genuinely at peace. She had learned that Daria had, in the weeks since her return to the eastern provinces, begun a correspondence with a scholar from Alexandria whose work she admired. Lord Castor had mentioned this in a diplomatic note with the carefully neutral phrasing of an uncle who is very pleased but has been instructed not to say so.
The vows concluded.
They walked out of the temple together into the September light, and Rome received them with the noise that only Rome can make — vast and particular and warm, the sound of a city that has had its share of dark chapters and is glad to have one that ends well.
Livia stood in the September light with Lucian beside her and Rome roaring its approval around them and felt the full weight of the year that had brought them here: the banquet and the garden and the letters and the library and her father's garden and Daria in Portia's colonnade and Corvus in his library of scrolls and the Forum on the day she had walked into it and spoken plainly, which was perhaps the bravest thing she had done. All of it, built one piece at a time, the way everything real is built.
She turned to look at Lucian.
He was already looking at her.
"Well," she said.
"Well," he agreed.
The city acclaimed them. The September sun was generous. Her father was in the crowd somewhere behind her, watching his daughter's impossible thing turn out to be possible after all.
"I want to tell you something," Lucian said quietly, under the noise of Rome.
"Tell me."
"The night of the banquet. When I saw you across the hall." He held her gaze. "I didn't know what I was looking at. I just knew I had to know your name."
"You already told me that."
"I know." A pause. "What I hadn't told you is what I thought, later, when I did know your name. When I found out who you were and what had happened to your family and how you had survived it." He looked at her steadily. "I thought: this is a woman who built herself out of the wreckage of someone else's choices. And I thought that I had never wanted to know anyone more."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Lucian," she said.
"Yes?"
"You talk a great deal for a man who was once very good at keeping his thoughts to himself."
He almost laughed. The not-quite-smile became the real one. "You did that," he said. "You happened to me and now I talk."
She took his hand.
They turned back to face the city — their city, enormous and complicated and endlessly itself, full of beauty and politics and ancient wrongs and the possibility of correction, full of people living their ordinary extraordinary lives in the golden September light.
The crowd's acclaim continued. Somewhere in it, Gaius was cheering with the uninhibited enthusiasm of a young man who has recently decided that public displays of feeling are philosophically sound. Portia was saying something to the woman beside her that was probably both insightful and devastating. Marcus Varro was standing very straight and very still, watching his daughter with the expression of a man who has been given back more than he lost.
"What do you want to do now?" Lucian asked.
Livia considered.
She had spent three years wanting to survive. She had spent the summer wanting to fix things — the treaty, the case, the faction, all the pieces that needed moving. She had wanted, underneath all of it, this: him, and the life that was now, properly and officially, beginning.
"Everything," she said. "In roughly that order."
He raised her hand to his lips in the ancient formal way that she had decided she loved.
Rome celebrated around them.
The September light held.
Everything was possible, and they had all the time in the world to find out what that meant.