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“No.”

“You do,” Safinia insisted. He would not meet her eyes. “What if I’m not back before raiding season begins? What if this is the year they try to get close again? You will need to be there for them, fast. Not drunk and stumbling around.”

He had the gall to look wounded, when they both knew what she was referring to. Four years ago, they’d been returning from the city, Mettius barely three steps from unconscious with drink, Safinia just tipsy. The alcohol had burned out of her blood as soon as she smelled smoke.

“Forget about it,” he’d yelled in her ear. “Whatever happened, we’re too late. Spare yourself looking at it for at least a moment.”

He meant the wreckage, maybe even bodies, that would be left behind. But he was wrong—Safinia abandoned him, even if it meant a stray bandit would find him lying on the path and stick a spear through his belly, and ran. When she made it home, half-choked from the smoke she sucked into her lungs in rattling breaths, she found Anesia clutching those three dented bracelets, standing aside as Gaius and Aulus and some other neighbors threw buckets of water onto the inferno of Safinia’s roof.

She clutched Anesia’s shoulders. “Attice?”

Anesia broke, fell against Safinia and wailed as only a child could, though she’d had her bleeds a month before. It took Aulus’s help to disentangle her fingers from Safinia’s chiton, and to figure which direction the two who’d taken Attice had run. She went after them with just a spear and her smoked lungs, thinking, Slow them down, Atty, just a little.

A few days after she and her sister had returned, sleeping in the half-collapsed cave made of their home, a cloth drawn over the gaping open face that separated the sleeping mat from the ruinous mess of their hearth, Safinia went up the hill and slugged Mettius.

He took this from her—and still had a small scar from the split in his eyebrow—but when she tried to swing again, he threw her over his shoulder and Safinia could do nothing but scream at him until she was limp and his back bruised where she’d beat on it. He forgave her for this. He had to, if he wanted her to forgive him for catching hold of her and telling her to give up before he even knew what she was losing.

How different it could have been. Mettius was one of the best wrestlers in the city. He knew his way around knives and spears. If he’d been sober—Safinia clenched her jaw. She looked at Mettius, still rumpled from sleep.

“I am counting on you,” she said. “I have to. You’re the only one close enough to hear if they scream.”

She could see the fear in him, that maybe she was right, maybe raiders would come again, and maybe that would be a night he was slow coming home from the city, heavy with wine—Safinia watched his eyes and knew he feared that he would fail her again.

She would not reassure him—let it be the motivation he might need.

Light filled the sky by the time she reached the salt road, a massive, winding thing that followed the Tiber from the Apennine peaks to the Tyrrhenian Sea, so called because it ended in the salt flats—men took boats down the river and returned by way of the salt road, laden with ceramics heavy with something more precious even than gold.

Safinia would leave the road long before she wandered into dangerous territory—beyond Antemnae, Latin cities clung fiercely to their holdings close to the flats. And there was Rome, too, in the middle of three vast powers—Sabinum, Etruria, and Latium—a violent home for the worst castoffs of each nation. She planned to turn to the east, and Crustumerium, long before Rome became an issue.

As she walked, something thumped against Safinia’s thigh—the ring, the gold one she’d taken from Hersilia’s ledger room. She held it in her palm and studied it in the light. The design, the one she couldn’t quite make out when she stole it, was clear in the morning sun: It was so expertly rendered, carved with such impossibly fine tools, that she half-wanted to run back and show Orestilla. The image was of a she-wolf, suckling two babies. One grasped for a teat, the wolf-mother rigid and exhausted, though her upper lip was curled in a snarl.

Had Attice ever told a story like that? Safinia couldn’t quite remember. When she looked up, the ring still in her fingers, the world looked hazy—it felt much like the strange visions salt miners described in the flats, a mist rising from where the still, watered horizon met the sky. She thought she could almost see buildings, not trees, in the hills that rolled away from Cures and down to the sea. Lines of them, like the veins in her palm, leading to a nexus, a city that was too far yet to make out, but would have to be huge—it would have to be massive. Then she blinked, and the image scattered, so quick that it must have been flecks of something in her eyes.

Safinia fished a bit of string from her pack and slid the ring onto it, tying it around her neck. It landed heavy on her chest. Above, a cloud of starlings lit from a tree and swooped to follow her south.

VIII

Soon the road left the open, ridged hills of Safinia’s home, dipping into the sprawl of woods along the Tiber, narrowing and growing wilder. The uneven set to the stones underfoot annoyed Safinia before the sun had fully risen; she left the path to pace it a hundred steps to the east. The forest floor was uneven, too, but in more predictable ways, for those who knew the way things grew.

Safinia’s awareness spread to the trees. It was oddly quiet—someone was keeping pace with her off the path. And yet if they were a danger to her, she felt sure that something in the earth would have told her already. She smiled. “Timaeus,” she called. Her old hunting partner.

He materialized from behind a nearby trunk, three fowl slung over his shoulder. “Good health, Safinia. I came to see why you were off your normal beat.”

“Leaving for a while.” Safinia eyed the dead birds. “Could you spare one of those for an offering?”

“You’re getting cheap with our goddess,” Timaeus teased. They both knew Feronia was due the first meal of travelers through her wilds, but Safinia hadn’t been looking forward to sacrificing her breakfast instead of eating it. “Follow me and I’ll get you a live one. She’ll forgive you for a bit of fresh blood.”

He led her off the road, past some ramshackle huts, mostly abandoned—one of many small villages that had been left long enough for Feronia to take them back. Finally, they came to a hut half-subsumed by growth, with a lean-to door.

Timaeus had been a friend for years, not just a reliable hunter but a teacher of all that wasn’t intuitive in her worship. He’d once told her that he had been born so far to the south that it may as well have been a different world. In any case, he’d had to flee that place when a tyrant took it. Besides these details he was slow to talk about himself, slow to talk about anything—Safinia, for all her love of quiet, felt downright chatty whenever Timaeus got to thinking, tugging at strands in his wiry beard and eventually arriving at a cryptic comment on the forces of nature.

She followed him into the hut, trying not to seem as interested as she was. Plants, meat, and sheafs that looked like cloth hung to dry opposite a little stone-and-hay bed; upon closer inspection, they were scrolls, the ink on a few still freshly laid. Safinia peered at them. She didn’t recognize the lettering.

“Greek,” Timaeus said from behind her. “It’s what I was schooled in.”

“You were schooled?”

“Extensively. This way.” He ducked outside to a crudely fenced pen and selected a chicken, layering his fists around its neck and snapping it cleanly. “You’re surprised?”