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Attice reached for Safinia’s hand. She’d been quiet, pained during this conversation. “We could stay in the city, with Ores, while you are away.”

“Absolutely not,” Safinia said. “I’m not having whoever is disappearing city girls show up and find you there.”

“We’d be together,” Anesia said. Her excitement was palpable, but it did not seem sudden. Safinia narrowed her eyes. Anesia was like a pot on a slow simmer. The realization hit her: They’d talked about this already. “And Mettius could come with us, like a guard.”

“I couldn’t live with a man unmarried,” Orestilla demurred.

“You don’t have to,” Safinia said. She couldn’t hide her annoyance. “He’s in the market for a wife—do you want me to get your dowry bracelets?”

“Safinia!” Attice chastised.

“He’s a drunk!” She’d smelled it on his breath earlier that day. Three pairs of eyes looked at her reproachfully. Safinia threw herself to her feet and grabbed her spear, yanking the leather cover from its point. “I’m going hunting. Tell me what the plan is when I return—it’s clear you have one already.”

Safinia stomped off, neither quiet nor calm enough to have any real hope of bagging an animal that wasn’t either injured or very stupid. A small voice in her head—one that she yearned to pull out of her ear, give weight and form to, and then threaten with knives—told her she had no right to be angry. Not when she’d dreamed of this. Not when only a season ago she was up a frigid pine, looking over the land to the north and wondering what it would be like to disappear herself.

A few hours gathering bark tempered Safinia; she was prepared to admit that they’d been heading toward this all along. It would be easier to find traces of Livy on the road to Crustumerium, if he’d indeed gone that way—a man that fussy would have been sleeping at outposts, all of which would surely remember him.

But under this burst of reasonable thinking was a layer of hurt that Safinia could not shake.

Attice almost never slept without both her sisters curled beside her. It had to be torture, living and sleeping in the same place that she had once been stolen from. When they’d first returned, she could not let Safinia out of her sight even to hunt, not until Anesia had begged as many favors from their neighbors as they could spare to keep them fed. The weight of Attice’s fear had pulled Safinia down, funneled her into the ground and smothered her, caught between the surface and the shadowed world where the dead rested, unable to reach either.

But what about the times when Safinia woke, herself in a cold sweat, her eyes red-rimmed, remembering the heat of a man’s intestine cooling under her hand? Only Attice’s terror had made it possible to tuck her own fears away.

If Attice was better now, truly better, not just a few good days—what would happen the next time Safinia smelled blood and was sent back to that night? It happened at such inexplicable times. Sometimes the stain of copper was on her hands all day, and then as the sun would set, she’d look down at them and be transported, swaying, a roaring in her ears. Duty always brought her back. Maybe it was the only thing that could bring her back.

Her hands shook. Sick and selfish, to fear Attice being healed. Safinia put her face in her hands and breathed deep the smell of soil.

This was all a god was. Dirt. A feeling underfoot. Not a being that wore armor and walked a battlefield and had favorites, grievances, petty feelings about its sisters and brothers. A god was the roots made manifest. A thought that came from many people naming a thing the same; fire, trees, doorways. These were gods. Safinia wiped her palms from wrists to elbows to shoulders, leaving streaks of dirt along her skin.

She thought she could feel the movement of the earth beneath her, like a tide, rushing around her ankles and tugging in a direction that wasn’t home. She decided to let it take her.

When she returned, a flurry of activity had already been set in motion; Orestilla and Anesia argued over what would need to be packed (Safinia glanced over their pile and deduced that half of it—tooth grit, hair oils, and a change of clothes—was useless to her). A small spark of annoyance tried to catch—so no one had believed that Safinia would return to tell them all to kick rocks—but the wick had already been dampened.

“Where is Attice?” she asked.

Orestilla and Anesia glanced at each other. “Inside,” Anesia said. “She’s feeling poorly.”

The hut was still stuffy from the sun that had only just released the land from its relentless beating. Attice lay curled on her side, her hair fanned over her shoulders like a blanket. It would be matted with sweat before bedtime. Safinia gathered it together and nudged Attice upright so it could be braided.

“Don’t let Anesia shirk this chore while I’m away,” Safinia said around a brass pin held in her teeth. “We’ve got all those fancy oils now to keep it from getting tangled.”

She wanted to cry, throw herself over Attice, and beg her to yell at her. She would have settled for the way, when she was Anesia’s age, Attice would comb her fingers through Safinia’s hair and kiss the top of her head. But there was no use in asking for things that were gone, now.

Attice caught her wrist as Safinia turned to go. “Crustumerium,” she said.

“What?”

“There was a siege there, before we were born. Mama was with the men who finally broke it. They might remember her there. Centurias are rare, they get a lot of attention. You could use that.”

“It sounds like they might not remember her fondly.”

Attice shook her head. “The governor is Sabine. He will have made sure the Latins were converted or exiled when the city was conquered. You won’t have to creep around to find Hersilia if he sees you as someone with status.”

Safinia snorted, looking around their hut. King Tatius had never known quite what to do with Calliste the Centuria except send her to battle, and everything she’d brought back that might have reflected well on the family had been stolen by now, besides those three dented dowry bracelets. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

Preparations revolved around Safinia and, carried by Anesia, spread through the rest of their small outskirts village. Gaius came by to gift Safinia some smoked jerky, which she accepted with a rush of both gratitude and shame that made her nauseous—by his look, and the way Gaius clapped her on the back and promptly left, he understood. Aulus’s family, farmers a mile or two to the north, dropped by with assurances that they would look after Anesia. Aulus himself was in the city, which suited Safinia—she wasn’t sure whether he was more outskirts or quaestor these days—but his mother, a stern, wiry woman, said she would do her best to call him back, so there would be one more fighting arm around with Safinia gone.

Mettius did not come down the hill, but Safinia noticed him dithering on the ridge, pacing back and forth and gesturing to himself, as she got to work sharpening every blade she could get her hands on.