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“No, not exactly—” Safinia had to stop to think about it. “I suppose it’s just something the Sabine are used to. That there comes a time when you have to leave.”

“Interesting.” Livy was beaming. “There are theories, you know, that the city I live in was founded through a kind of ver sacrum. Certainly animal guides were involved, divine intervention and the like. It’s worth me thinking more about. Now—tell me again about the census.”

Safinia, for her part, started with home. “What wars come to Cures?” she asked. “Will there be siege or famine in my lifetime?” Some said it was only a matter of time—Latium had grown huge and sprawling, swallowing other kingdoms as protectorates. Sabinum, as small as it was, had so far stood on the advantage of being in the mountains.

“Cures Sabini will stand for centuries. You have nothing to worry about.”

“And Crustumerium?”

Livy paused. “It will change hands a time or two, I think. I don’t know when.”

“What about—” Safinia thought. “Antemnae.” Her father’s father was born near Antemnae, south of Cures, close to what was now Rome.

“Do you plan to list every city you can think of to get an accounting of its military history?” He betrayed some irritation at last. “I have no talent for that. I don’t know what sieges occur where—most battles are simply not important enough to survive oral memory, and I’m never quite sure about dates, anyway.”

She had questions about food (“Unimportant”), future kings of Sabinum (“Not one greater than Titus Tatius”), and hunting instruments (“Do I look like I have ever held a bow?”), and more besides. His answers ranged from mysterious to specific but altogether useless. Some of Safinia’s questions, he simply answered, “It wouldn’t make any sense to you.”

On one of these, she pressed the issue—and was subjected to a lengthy explanation of the lunar cycle that took them all the way to lunch. “—thought it was the nones of May, though it does seem a bit hot for this time of year, so maybe, in fact, we’ve reached the ides already. Though there have been some revisions to the calendar to accommodate for drift, so the one I’m accustomed to probably has no bearing in the now—do you know how many days it’s been since the last full moon?”

Safinia turned to glance back at him. The day was shaping up sunny, its heat burning away yesterday’s damp. “Have you tired yourself out, yet?”

“You’re the one who asked,” he grumbled.

The one thing she didn’t ask about was her line. Maybe there were others in her clan, still living in Antemnae, but her father had never said as much. That the Safinius name might die with her and her sisters was something that had only occurred to her a few years ago, when she rejected Anesia’s first marriage proposal from a traveler who lived far on the outskirts. “I’m not sending our sister to live in a flooded, muddy fishing shack,” she’d said to Attice that night.

But later, when Safinia should have been asleep, she stared at the ceiling, dim and flickering from the hearth burning low. Her name would someday cease to exist. It felt, for a moment, like the death of every good ancestor who had carried it, too.

She could feel Livy wondering why she held it back. Wouldn’t it be the first thing Hersilia or Tarpeia would want to know? But she didn’t want to hear him say that he’d never met a Safinius, if that was true.

Each night she lay awake a long time after setting her snares, listening to Livy snore, marveling that he apparently saw so little threat in her that he could fall asleep before she was even settled for the night. She had never slept so far from her sisters. She missed waking with Attice’s arms tangled around her. Sometimes Anesia, too, wedged a hand as far as Safinia’s hair and held it loosely as she slept. When Orestilla joined them, scrunched up on Anesia’s other side, it was so warm that they barely needed the hearth at all.

How were they getting on without her? Were they bored, afraid, overwhelmed? Safinia didn’t think Orestilla would leave them if the excitement of living in the outskirts wore off, but what if she’d judged the girl wrong? What if—and Safinia felt heartless for even thinking it—they were fine, Safinia replaced as neatly as Orestilla’s delicately folded hands, her perfect posture? She couldn’t bear, after denying herself so many things, to find that the sacrifice was meaningless.

She thought, also, of Hersilia. What she might look like when they found her. What she might feel when she learned that Safinia had come looking. Whether it was true, what Orestilla claimed, that she still wanted Safinia as much as Safinia wanted her. She tried to imagine Hersilia’s face, but Orestilla, with just similar enough features, made it impossible. This was another thing that kept her up: the way she sought Orestilla’s eye, just as she had Hersilia’s. Somehow, she’d gotten them mixed up with each other, and the feelings had leaked.

By this point the night would be half-gone, and Safinia would either get up and walk far enough away that she couldn’t hear Livy’s snoring, or else stare at him and fantasize about punching him in the windpipe until she drifted off despite herself.

X

Gradually, the mountains grew gentler, becoming hills, the forest much sparser. They were closer to Crustumerium now than Cures—soon they would be walking through farmland. The soil was said to be so fertile there that even Greeks were coming up from the south to work the land. Safinia was disappointed to descend—not just because the heat was becoming oppressive, but because she’d had a wild idea that she would be able, at some point in their journey, to see the sea. It seemed impossible that it was really made of water, the same as fell on the ground and ran in the Tiber. In her imagination, it was a mist upon which nations floated and bumped into each other.

As the trees opened up, the forest floor dappled with sunlight, and thin, widely spaced trunks were all that was between them and the salt road, Safinia found herself carrying her spear as they walked instead of strapping it between her hip and bag. She wasn’t even sure if she could call this airy path “forest,” though that was technically correct. It unnerved her to be able to see plainly through these thin, young trunks.

This, then, must be the lighter green she could see from that tall pine north of her home.

True enough, it was fun traveling as Livy’s pupil. Safinia had run out of questions of her own, but he had endless interesting tidbits to share. He seemed to have a reflexive need to teach. He had plenty of strange little instruments for her to make a fool of herself with. Her favorite was the abacus.

“It makes sense you’ve a hand with mathematics,” Livy said. “You’re certainly the calculating type.”

“I think Numa has one of these,” Safinia said. “It actually makes me feel better to think that he works out the grain allotment with proper numbers.”

“So it should.” Livy was smiling. “I’m glad you’re enjoying learning new things. I’ve always found that to be one of the greater pleasures of living. Have you ever considered a career as a research assistant?”

“Depends,” Safinia said. “What is that?”

He laughed. “Oh, they can be anything. But generally they assist a historian in fetching books from obscure places, or bringing samples back, or just reading aloud. I have two in my employ, and they’re absolutely useless. I’d hire you in a second if you had half a mind to relocate.”

“Wouldn’t you want someone who could read?”