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It was impossible to argue with his logic. The string of connections I had made seemed laughably thin. The odds had never been good that the place in which I had grown up would also prove to be the site of the long-lost cave city. It was time to let the idea go. Disappointment rose like an ache inside me.

I picked up my cloak. “I need some air to clear my head. I’m going to step outside. I won’t be long. Seb, will you come with me?”

He followed me down the narrow staircase, walking stick rapping on each stair. Tosca was bent over her table, shoulder bones glaring, eyes focused on her work. She gave me a quick smile as we went out.

The wind blew through the narrow lane with a briskness that made me grateful for my cloak. We set off along the cobbled pavement. Shopkeepers were opening their storefronts, unfastening the chains that bolted the doors, sweeping dirt from the thresholds. We passed a candlemaker’s shop, reeking of tallow, long white tapers hanging by their strings in the window. Another dressmaker’s shop—how many were there in the city? A goldsmith’s, with black iron bars on the door. Farther on, a place that sold lamp oil.

The lane turned a corner. It was as though I were looking at the city through new eyes. I remembered gazing down on these buildings and rooftops from the terraces of Casa Caligine high above, wondering about the people who lived in the city. Here I was now, moving among them.

I reached out and slipped my hand into Sebastianus’s. He flexed his fingers almost involuntarily and then closed them softly over mine.

“Anna, there’s something else,” he said quietly. “While I was in the records room, I flipped through a few of Marta’s diaries, and I noticed several references to infants, along with certain names that recur frequently. I think Cassius was right to ask questions about the children of courtesans. I believe there’s a secondary industry in Corlivo. Infant girls are sold to nurseries to be raised for the pleasure houses, and I strongly suspect infant boys are sold to peasant families in the lowlands of the Kotol range for labor and conscription into the army.”

I stopped on the sidewalk. “I’ve learned that the matrons manipulate the infusion. Ingredients are changed, so that sometimes it’s a contraceptive and sometimes it’s not. And the women are forced to give up any children they bear.”

He shook his head in disgust. “Even overlooking the anguish of those women, which is terrible to imagine, it means that hundreds of noblemen have fathered children here without knowing it, and their offspring have been forced into a life of toil and servitude.”

“Many noblemen would not care about that.”

He grimaced. “Some wouldn’t, but many would. The idea that I might have fathered a child and didn’t know I had, and that my child might be living a life of sorrow and pain, is nearly unbearable.”

“No child should live a life of sorrow and pain, whether the offspring of a nobleman or a poor farmer. But what can be done about it?”

He squeezed my hand. “I don’t know. But I’m going to do something. I have—I have a lot to answer for, given the time I’ve spent here.”

We resumed walking toward the center of the city. We passed the arena where the circus was held in the warmer months and the quiet open square that, in a few weeks, would be transformed into the winter market.

“I’m sorry I brought us all here on a whim,” I said. “I’ve asked so much of everyone.”

“No. Your theory was a very sound one. Expeditions have begun based on far less.”

Our wandering eventually brought us to a long stone building on Corlivo’s main thoroughfare. It was surrounded by a wall, beyond which we could hear the faint sounds of girls calling to one another.

“They must be out in the garden,” I said.

He looked at me quizzically.

“This is the Schola Morum,” I said, “the training school for courtesans.”

He leaned on his walking stick, scanning up the stone wall to the roof of the building beyond. “By the gods. Here it is, the place you were raised.”

I remembered the game Kyra and I had played, piling stones into little fairy houses in a quiet corner of the garden, imagining for ourselves a grand, expansive future. What foolish things we had learned: dancing, calligraphy, witty conversation. Years we spent learning, training, rehearsing. To what end? Then we must take care what lessons we are teaching them. Kyra had deserved so much more.

AS I STOOD listening at the wall, Sebastianus came up behind me and put his arms around me. “Is this all right?” he whispered in my ear.

I nodded, so grateful for his warmth and his touch that I had to blink away the moisture that welled up behind my eyes. “We learned nothing here to help us make lives for ourselves beyond the pleasure house. The dressmaker who is renting us rooms can barely manage her account books.” I wiped at my damp cheeks. “And there are so few escape routes. Scraping by here in the city, running away, taking a sleeping powder. We’re the most valuable commodity in the city, and we have the fewest choices.”

He nodded into my hair.

I thought of Kyra, who loved children; of the two little girls I had seen skipping out of the schoolhouse in Mareus; of Portia, who made sure they had a chance to learn something.

A school.

The idea seemed to flash like a white heat within me.

I turned quickly in his arms. “Seb, women in Corlivo need a proper school. Women here need a chance to learn about the forces that move the world around us, history, politics, mathematics, the work of the ancient thinkers and philosophers. We’re capable of so much, but without the right lessons, we’ll never have the opportunity to control our own lives.”

He took a small step back so he could see my face. “You are living proof of what Corlivo women are capable of.”