The Emperor asked Lucian to walk with him.
This was unusual. Aurelius was a man who convened meetings, not walks. Walks were for the kind of conversation that needed to be unrecorded, and unrecorded conversations with the Emperor were not, in Lucian's experience, ever entirely comfortable.
They walked the long colonnade that overlooked the city — Rome spread below them in the summer heat, enormous and particular and endlessly itself. His father walked slowly, which was partly age and partly the deliberateness of a man who does not move until he knows where he is going.
"The faction," Aurelius said, "has been to see me."
Lucian kept his pace steady. "All three?"
"Galeo directly. Severa through intermediaries. Tullus through his complaint, which is a form of communication." His father looked out over the city. "They are concerned about the stability of arrangements."
"The arrangements were built on assumptions that no longer hold."
"Yes. I know that." A pause. "That is not, actually, their primary concern. Their primary concern is that if the current arrangements change, other arrangements become possible. Arrangements they don't control." He glanced sideways at Lucian. "They are afraid of you making choices."
"I am the Crown Prince."
"Which is precisely what makes your choices threatening." Aurelius was quiet for a moment. "Galeo told me you have been corresponding privately with Marcus Varro's daughter."
"Yes."
"He framed it as a scandal."
"He would."
"I framed it to him," his father said, "as none of his business." A brief pause. "He is being reassigned. There is a provincial posting in the north that requires his particular experience with administrative arrangements. He will find it bracing."
Lucian stopped walking.
His father continued three paces and then stopped too, looking out over the city.
"I have been Emperor for thirty-one years," Aurelius said. "I have made choices in that time that I am proud of and choices I am not. The Varro case falls in the second category. I knew, at the time, that the prosecution was — managed. I permitted it because the political moment required it and Marcus Varro's specific guilt or innocence seemed less important than the resolution of a larger conflict." He paused. "It was wrong. That is a thing I can say now, when it costs something to say it, or I can not say it, which costs something else."
"It can still be corrected," Lucian said carefully.
"The case review is in motion. Corvus is co-sponsoring. It will reach its proper conclusion." His father turned to look at him directly. "I am telling you this so that you understand: I am not reversing course. I am not retreating to the original arrangements because Severa is angry or Tullus is frightened." He held Lucian's gaze. "What I am doing is this: I am asking you, my son, directly and without diplomatic wrapping, what you want. Not what is politically possible. Not what can be arranged. What you actually want."
The question landed with the weight of thirty-one years of its absence.
Lucian looked out over Rome. The city his father had governed. The city that would be his. The city that Livia had grown up in and navigated and survived and was now, quietly and purposefully, beginning to shape.
"I want to govern this city well," he said. "I want the eastern alliance to hold, in a form that serves both sides honestly. I want my father's mistakes and my own mistakes to be corrected where they can be." He paused. "And I want Livia Varro."
His father was quiet for a long moment.
"The treaty review has two weeks remaining," Aurelius said. "When it concludes, Lord Castor will have a proposal. I expect it will include a revised approach to the alliance structure that does not require the marriage clause in its current form." He looked back out at the city. "I will receive that proposal seriously. I am not promising you its outcome."
"I know."
"But I am telling you that I am receiving it seriously." Another pause. "Your mother would have liked her. From what you have told me, without telling me directly."
Lucian looked at his father and saw, briefly, the man behind the emperor: older, alone in the particular way of people who have governed too long to have ordinary relationships, carrying the weight of his correct and incorrect choices with equal equanimity.
"Thank you," Lucian said.
His father made a sound that was not quite dismissal and resumed walking. Lucian fell into step beside him, and they walked the colonnade together in the summer afternoon, two men looking out over the city that belonged to both of them, neither of them speaking for a while because there was nothing left to say that hadn't been said.
Below them, Rome moved on in its vast and indifferent and eternal way, unaware that above it, in a palace garden on an ordinary summer day, a father had answered his son's impossible question with something that was not yes and not no but was, finally, the beginning of both.