Chapter 17: The List of Names

The Curia Hostilia smelled of old wax and older grudges. I arrived before the sun had fully cleared the rooftops, and found the chamber nearly empty—only the scribes and the slaves who tended the braziers, and one man who had clearly been waiting for me.

Gaius Scribonius Curio lounged against a pillar, his toga arranged with the careless perfection of a man who had never once worried about the cost of wool. He smiled when he saw me, but the smile did not reach his eyes.

“Corvus,” he said. “You rise early. Guilt, or ambition?”

“Both,” I said. “They are the same thing, in this city.”

He laughed, and the sound echoed off the marble like a coin dropped on stone. “You have a way with words. Cicero would be proud.”

“Cicero is too busy saving the Republic to notice my rhetoric.”

“Is he?” Curio pushed off the pillar and fell into step beside me as I walked toward my bench. “I heard he spent last night writing letters to Pompey. Long letters. The kind a man writes when he is afraid of the reply.”

I did not slow. “And what do you hear of Caesar?”

Curio’s smile sharpened. “Caesar is in Ravenna, watching the snow melt and counting his legions. He sends letters too, but his are shorter. The kind a man writes when he already knows the answer.”

We reached my bench, and I sat. Curio remained standing, looking down at me with the easy confidence of a man who had never needed to scheme for a seat in this chamber. He had been born to his influence, and he squandered it beautifully.

“You came to tell me something,” I said. “Not to discuss the weather in Ravenna.”

“I came to warn you.” He crouched, bringing his face level with mine. His breath smelled of wine, though it was not yet the third hour. “There is a man named Labienus. He has been asking questions about you in the taverns near the Campus Martius. Questions about your debts, your meetings, your freedman.”

I kept my face still. “I have heard of him.”

“Then you know he is Caesar’s man. Or was. These days, it is hard to tell whose man anyone is.” Curio’s eyes flickered to the door of the Curia, where the first other senators were beginning to drift in. “He was asking about a document. A letter. He said it had been taken from a courier, and that the man who took it would regret the theft.”

The courier from the Three Owls. The dead man with his throat cut. The letter that had vanished before Tiro could read it.

“I do not know what you are talking about,” I said.

“Of course not.” Curio stood, brushing dust from his knees. “But if you did know, I would tell you that Labienus is not the only one looking for it. Pompey’s men are searching too. They think the letter contains a list of names—men who have pledged themselves to Caesar, and men who have pledged themselves against him. Written in Caesar’s own hand.”

My blood went cold, but I did not show it. “A list of names. That would be valuable.”

“Valuable enough to kill for. Valuable enough to die for.” Curio smiled again, and this time there was something almost like affection in it. “You are a clever man, Corvus. I have always admired that about you. But clever men have a habit of collecting dangerous things. Sometimes they forget that every object has a price, and the price is usually blood.”

He turned and walked away, joining a cluster of senators who were laughing at some joke I could not hear. I watched him go, and I felt the weight of the ring on my finger—Livia’s ring, the seal she had pressed into my palm like a promise and a threat.

The list of names.

I had not taken the letter from the courier. But I knew who had. I had known since the morning Tiro came to me with the news, his face pale, his hands steady.

Tiro had taken it. My freedman, my ears in every shadowed corridor, had cut the courier’s throat and taken the letter. He had not told me what was in it. He had said only that it was safer if I did not know.

But now Labienus was asking questions, and Pompey’s men were searching, and Curio had come to warn me with the easy smile of a man who enjoyed watching others dance on the edge of a blade.

I needed to read that letter.

I found Tiro in the tablinum of my house, bent over a stack of wax tablets, his stylus moving with the quick, precise strokes of a man who had been trained by Cicero himself. He looked up when I entered, and I saw the question in his eyes.

“Curio knows about the letter,” I said.

Tiro’s face did not change. “Curio knows many things. He is like a spider who pretends to be a fly.”

“He says Labienus is looking for it. Pompey’s men too.”

“I know.” Tiro set down his stylus and folded his hands. “I have been watching them watch us.”

“Then you know what is in it.”

A long pause. The braziers crackled. Somewhere in the street, a vendor shouted the price of bread.

“I know,” Tiro said. “And I have kept it from you because I judged it safer for you to be ignorant. But if Labienus is closing in, ignorance is no longer a shield. It is a noose.”

He reached into the folds of his tunic and produced a scrap of parchment, worn at the edges, stained with something that might have been wine and might have been blood. He held it out to me, and I took it.

The hand was tight, hurried, the hand of a man who had written it in the dark. But I knew it. I had seen it on dispatches from Gaul, on letters that passed through the Curia, on the proscriptions that had once borne the names of my father’s friends.

Caesar’s hand.

I read the list. Names I knew. Names I had whispered in the dark, names I had heard in the salons of Livia Drusa, names that would shake the Republic if they fell into the wrong hands.

And at the bottom, in a different ink, a single line: *Corvus is mine.*

I looked up at Tiro. His face was unreadable.

“He knows,” I said.

“He knows,” Tiro agreed. “And he has claimed you. For better or worse, you are his.”

The weight of the ring on my finger felt heavier. The web was tightening, but I was no longer the spider’s shadow.

I was the spider’s prey.

And Caesar had already sunk his fangs.