Now Hadrian was gone—had been gone for over thirty years—and Sabine had taken his place more than a decade later, born when at last the Emperor and his High College deigned to approve House Marlowe’s request for a new child. Sabine. Sabine was nearly half Crispin’s age, more a kind of daughter than a sister. Twenty-five years was a small enough gap in age between palatine siblings, yet Crispin found he could not think of his sister as anything but a child. And yet she was a woman grown: fully thirty years standard, and no longer an ephebe.
