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In the evening, she found Orestilla behind the hut, looking at the house shrine. The stone was smoothed by generations of Safinia’s ancestors touching its edges. “It looks different to the one my grandfather has,” Orestilla told Safinia.

“Yours is probably nicer.”

“No, smaller. I asked him once, and he told me we didn’t need any Lares. Is that who these figures are, here?” She pointed to the roughened figures carved out of shrine’s stone relief. Weather had made their features indistinguishable a long time ago.

“I think so,” Safinia said. “I don’t know their names.”

“Really? That surprises me.”

“Why, because people living on the outskirts are superstitious?”

“Well—” Ores shrugged. “Yes, I thought so. Are you not?”

Safinia slid to a seat against the shrine, and after a moment’s hesitation, Ores settled herself in the grass beside her. “By the standards in Cures, I suppose we are. We keep the shrine for Feronia mostly, though.” The stone was carved with the goddess’s symbols—winding tree roots and open shackles for wildness and freedom—Safinia’s crude additions. “Our Lares are lost.”

“How can they be lost? Sabus still guards Cures.”

“Sabus is older than my ancestors.” Safinia smiled to cover her bitterness. “When Cures was built, Sabus found a passage to the underworld and stoppered it with a boulder. It was supposed to be uncovered for festival days so our ancestors could return, but people stopped making the trip, and now no one knows where it is.”

Safinia thought often of looking for it. Sometimes, waiting perched in a tree for game to trot underneath, she imagined herself scaling a wintery peak, the wind whipping at her face, and finding the stone that trapped her mother in a murky, shadowed world. Or sometimes it was by the sea, or deep in the forest, so covered in moss she almost mistook it for ground.

“No ancestors can guard us unless the passage is uncovered. Least of all our family Lares.”

Each year the wall was built higher, the old ways skipped over, and Safinia’s daydream more ridiculous. She knew now death was permanent.

Orestilla mulled this. They were quiet, watching the light move in currents over the hills, stirred by grasses that waved in the wind. Lanterns began to glow in the distance; Safinia’s neighbors, some of them friends, all of them community.

“It’s so beautiful out here,” Orestilla said at last. “I haven’t been so happy since I was a child. I want to know everything—they act like Feronia is a god for savages in the city. Will you teach me how to offer to her?”

Safinia looked at her, a sadness caught in her chest. It would be easy to be dismissive of Orestilla—she still did not know how dangerous it was out here, how scarce food could become, and how they barely counted as Quirites when it came to the census. Orestilla was soft. Not so soft she couldn’t toughen, but enough that it would be work to keep herself here, whatever danger waited for her in her own town house in the city. She only hungered to know what life was in the outskirts because she’d never been presented with choices for a life of her own. Safinia wanted to brush her off, if not for that Feronia was a god of freedom as much as wildness, and Orestilla was undoubtedly still shackled.

“They fear Feronia behind the walls,” Safinia said, only half-answering Orestilla. “Those who wish to build cities must treat her carefully—otherwise the wild will take the city back.”

Orestilla shivered, but when Safinia looked, she was smiling, her eyes lit with the last colors of the day—red and blue and streaky. Soon, reflected in the same wide pupils, would come stars.

VII

Safinia awoke in the middle of the night, Attice’s hair tickling her nose. They were four to the mat: Safinia closest to the threshold, then Attice, Anesia, and on the far side, Orestilla. Safinia watched them through her lashes, distinguishable forms breathing in mismatched rhythms.

Her things were packed and stowed beside her spear. She rose and shouldered her satchel, then strapped her father’s old hunting knife to a crude sheath she’d fashioned for her forearm. The spear and bow were her mother’s; they went to her other shoulder and her right hand, respectively.

A spasm of fear seized her as Safinia stood, her hand raised to push the curtain aside and leave. Who could say whose lands were whose, especially when the woods muddled their borders? But even so—Crustumerium would be farther than the ill-defined these lands, the only Safinia had walked.

The easy path would take her on its winding way to the salt road—from there, she could decide whether to follow hunting trails north of where the Tiber split into the Allia, or farther down the salt road if she wasn’t sure she could navigate without following the Allia directly.

A prickling on Safinia’s neck. She looked up the ridge, softly swore to herself, then turned instead to climb it.

Mettius was asleep, his hut set slightly apart from the one his father and little sisters shared. It was small, little more than a roof over a sleeping mat and storage—the hearth was in the big hut. Safinia set down her bag with a soft thump and Mettius scrambled upright, his eyes wild. He blinked at her like he couldn’t quite figure out who she was.

“The time it takes you to be lucid could mean death for my sisters,” Safinia said.

This, apparently, was all he needed. Mettius let out a breath and leaned back. “Saffie.”

“I’m leaving for a while.” Safinia squatted to his eye level, balanced by her spear. “Can I trust them with you?”

“I swear it,” he said, yawning. She could see that he wanted to be back asleep. “Anything else?”

“You think I’m paranoid.”