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“Without a retinue of domestici and guards and a parade down the streets on her way out?”

Safinia flopped down and linked her fingers behind her head, watching the nighttime clouds scuttle overhead. “Maybe not, then.”

They discussed things for half the night, long after Anesia had crawled in to sleep beside Attice. Half-formed theories and plans lingered in the air—as late as it was, in the diminishing glow of Safinia’s lamp, their task took the shape of an old hero-story. Safinia shivered as she imagined it. Hersilia, some kind of glittering half-god, who would likely marry whoever found her in the end. Or kill them, or herself. Those seemed to be the only three options for a woman in the stories Attice told.

And yet every time she looked at Orestilla, reality came into sharp focus. Safinia remembered how it had felt to go after Attice. If those raiders hadn’t dawdled, separated from their fellows, or if they’d taken more care to cover their tracks through the woods, she knew she would have spent the rest of her life hunting for Attice. She would have taken a boat from Veii, if she had to, and searched every slave market on the Tyrrhenian coast. Orestilla would do the same for her sister. It was all over her face.

“I wonder . . .” Safinia began. She gnawed on the pads of her fingers. A thought was forming. Well, a little light mischief was warranted, if they were going to get anywhere. All they had to go on was Tarpeia’s hint about a friend in the south. “Could you get us into your father’s villa?”

The next night, Orestilla led Safinia around the wall that blocked Numa’s estate from the street, and through a narrow alleyway that concealed them from passersby. The wall here was lower; on the other side, a small thicket of trees.

Numa’s was not the only villa perched on Cures’s north side, but it was the largest.

It gripped the land tightly, like it had always been there, though Safinia knew better. The King’s Regia had existed for centuries, but the stone villas were only a generation or two old. Hersilia’s grandfather had lived in a packed mud and thatched roof home, himself. A large one, but still. Most of the wealth walled away inside Cures was new, even if everyone pretended otherwise.

“This is where I used to sneak in,” Orestilla said, tugging on the hem of her chiton. It was one of Attice’s tunics, much too large for her, and she acted like it was the roughest material that had ever touched her skin. “The trees here are ornamental, but they don’t have to be trimmed or shaped. No one wanders near, usually.”

“Not that we need to worry too much, right?” Safinia asked. “Your father will hardly have you thrown out.”

“Um,” Orestilla said. “Right.”

She boosted Safinia over the wall, and the two women crouched in the thicket. The estate was mostly dark—there, in the distance, was the shadowy orchard where Safinia once met Hersilia; the rest was unfamiliar. Orestilla whispered details: Those were houses for guards and domestici, built with packed mud and crude angles. They had proper doors, and strong, well-made roofs that wouldn’t dare cave in, as Safinia’s had three or four times over the years.

The house itself was a decadent fifteen rooms encircling a lavish courtyard for entertaining guests. Only a few soft lamps still burned in their windows. “Kitchen,” Orestilla whispered. “And the tablinum. That’s where my father’s writing desk is—he must still be awake.”

“Which is Hersilia’s room?”

“This way.”

Orestilla led her to a window with closed shutters and, after a moment’s hesitation, slid the flat of a knife between them and flipped the latch, crawling inside and practically dragging Safinia with her. “Quick!” she hissed. “I’m sure the guards are on high alert.”

“Are they?” Safinia asked. “No one seemed to be patrolling outside.”

“They are. They have to be. I told you our father would take Hersilia’s disappearance seriously.” She caught Safinia’s raised eyebrow and tossed her hair, a gesture that was so like Hersilia that Safinia’s heart squeezed. “That’s not to say there’s no point in us poking around. Never too many hands helping. Just be careful.”

Orestilla refused to light a lamp, and it took some time for Safinia’s eyes to adjust, to find the shapes of furniture and sculpture in the dark. Hersilia’s bedroom was at once nothing like she imagined—she was unprepared for this level of wealth, even knowing Hersilia intimately—and completely expected. The posts of Hersilia’s bed were capped with brass, as was the entire frame of a reclining couch at its foot. A ridiculous expense.

Even the weave of her sleeping mat was expert, so taut over a frame that it should have felt like solid wood—but when Safinia pressed her hand into it, the give was slight but comfortable. Safinia spared a moment to wonder if Mettius would be able to help her lash a bed frame of her own to stretch her mat onto—but even their best efforts would only remind her how far she was from true comfort.

Orestilla paced the room, nonsensically checking in decorative vases and running her hands along the walls, which were beginning to materialize in Safinia’s sight, elaborately painted with geometric patterns.

“Is there anything out of place?” she asked. “Anything missing?”

Orestilla opened a trunk and ran her fingers over the cloth folded inside. “I don’t know. When we were kids, she sorted her dresses by color.” She sorted through a small stack. “Now it’s by style. And I don’t see the blue-and-gold one, that was her favorite.”

“When was the last time you were here?”

Orestilla was silent. She moved on to picking through a shelf of Hersilia’s cosmetics.

“Ores,” Safinia said.

“Nine years,” Orestilla said. “Maybe ten.”

“Ten years?!” Safinia hissed. “You acted like this was a second home!”

“It is! It was! I just wouldn’t recommend we be caught wandering around.”

“Numa’s going to think I’m here to rob him.” Visions of being put on trial in the forum swamped Safinia’s imagination. “Would he even recognize you to vouch for me?”