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“What do you think would do the trick?”

Titus opened his mouth to respond—they needed a story, a narrative, an anchor in the past to hold on to, to make them feel a part of it all—then realized, by the glitter in Gaius’s eyes, that the emperor already knew. Why else would he keep Titus around? Why else would he make the name Livy important?

“Rome has two gods,” Gaius said. Behind him, the starlings gathered and opened like an enormous winged beast, articulated in points of darkness against the fading blue of the evening. “Two gods only. Me, because I decide her future. You, because you decide her past.”

He leaned forward. Titus could not look away. There was a flame in his eyes, a simmering apotheosis—his godhead clung to him, ready to rush into the space his body would leave behind when he died. Emperor Augustus. Emperor Octavian. Nephew of Julius Caesar. Architect of an empire. Leader of the West. Hail, August. And he knew, in that divine heart of his, that Titus had been unfaithful in mind if not in action.

“Forget your obligation to the facts,” Gaius said. “Forget what you learned there. Write the version we discussed and let it stand. The people need it. They’re clamoring for your next book, anyway. A good story unites better than a good leader. They will never accept total rule without you to show them how grand a king can be.”

They both knew how dangerous the word king was. It was why Gaius had chosen the title Augustus over Romulus. To reassure Rome that the truth wasn’t the truth. To dress the senate’s fears in ceremony and finery. Bread and circuses. A promise that they weren’t being ruled by a power as complete and unyielding as the gods.

Titus accepted another drink from one of the slaves. As it was passed, their fingers brushed. Before, he might have changed his grip, unconsciously distancing himself from even the lightest contact. But this time Titus glanced, just for a moment, at the slave’s carefully blank face. He could not guess at the thoughts beneath. They struck him, for the first time, as dangerous. The pain in his chest was a dull constant.

“Yes,” Titus agreed. He moved his lynchpin into danger rather than exploiting Gaius’s vulnerability. The game was now only ceremony; he’d lost. And yet they were obligated to play it out anyway. “It’s what Rome deserves. The right story. The right truth.”

Act I

753 BCE

“I shall have to go back more than seven hundred years, and trace my story from its small beginnings up to these recent times when its ramifications are so vast that any adequate treatment is hardly possible.”

—Titus “Livy” Livius, Ab Urbe Condita, Book I

I

Warmth that came before light clung to the humid walls of the hut. Safinia woke up with it sticking behind her neck, sweat caught in the tangle of her curls. She could just see the outlines of her sisters in the dark of the morning. Before she sat up to tie back her hair, she waited to see their shapes move, hear the soft huff of their breaths.

Attice stirred. They slept three aside on a mat rolled out in the cramped interior of their hut, close to the soft-glowing hearth. “Awake?” Attice asked.

“Yeah.”

Attice’s shoulders tensed. “We haven’t given offerings in a while.”

Safinia could feel her older sister’s anxiety grow in the silence. She touched Attice’s back—the pattern of her heart was rabbit-quick. She often woke up this way, her jaw clenched and her pulse wild. Safinia drummed her fingers against Attice’s skin. On good days, this soothed her. On bad days—well, it didn’t hurt to try. “Don’t make me get up early,” Safinia begged. “We don’t have anything good to offer, anyway.”

From Attice’s other side a thin hand extracted itself from the tangle of their blanket and limbs and pointed to a bundle of cloth sitting with jars of salt and vinegar, aside the hearth.

“Figs,” Anesia, their younger sister, mumbled. “Came early.”

“Where did you get those?” Safinia demanded. She hadn’t noticed them when she slumped in exhausted last night. But Anesia was already back asleep. Safinia looked to Attice for help—she, too, was far away. Her wide eyes tracked some invisible picture in the shadowed corners of their thatched roof.

Safinia frowned. Normally Attice stayed up until all three of them were safely accounted for, but the night before, Safinia had returned from hunting to find her sister soundly asleep. It was naive to think this meant that Attice would wake up to a good day. But—Safinia had hoped.

“Hey,” she said. “I’ll go do the offerings. I’ll do them right away.”

Attice’s eyes flicked to Safinia’s, then back to the ceiling. Safinia reached over and tapped the bridge of her nose, like she had every morning when they were children. There—the ghost of a smile. “No neglected ancestors here. I promise.” Safinia stretched her arms over her head. Her bad shoulder needed loosening. “Not when there’s figs to eat. Figs are sweeter than vengeance.”

“You’re a menace,” Attice rasped. But she smiled properly, even as her eyelids fluttered shut and stayed closed. Good. Maybe her dreams would be even sweeter than the figs.

Safinia slipped outside. Her toes wiggled in the cool, pebbled earth as she dressed and collected her mother’s spear. Their hut clung to a hardscrabble ridge, with just enough plateau beaten out of the steep for a garden and a single olive tree, ensconced by a low, rocky wall. The olive tree would flower soon, but for now it held buds like cupped hands, eerily listing to the east, waiting for the sun.

The horizon began to glow, dusting the treetops with light, and Safinia closed her eyes. She didn’t need to look at the land to traverse it. She cataloged it every day from her tired little garden—hills and ridges that went for miles, dotted with olive groves and small farms, and little packed mud huts like her own. The Tiber cut through it all, flashing bright where it caught the sun, before being swallowed by forest.

Soon it would be summer. The air would smell warm and buttery, and carry with it thousands of tiny white petals, shed by gnarled old olive trees that were too hardscrabble—too like the people who cared for them—to abide adornment.

In the stillness, and the changing patterns of light behind her eyelids, Safinia would be able to tell when the sun reached her neighbor’s hut, up the ridge, illuminating its bright garden wall.

The bundle of figs was tantalizingly heavy in her hand. Only loyalty to Attice kept her from sorting through them to steal the best one. Her sister would know if she tried to lie about giving it to the gods.