Page 3

Their house shrine faced the distant tree line. Its slanted stone roof poked out of the grass a short walk from the hut. Safinia passed it every morning on her way into the woods to hunt.

In the apartments in the city, house shrines were built into the walls, sheltered from the elements and regularly cleaned. Out here, several miles from the gates of Cures Sabini, shrines were weatherbeaten things, scattered with semi-rotted offerings. Not every family had one, anymore. There were heaps of stone dotting the grass, the mud-packed huts they would have stood aside long since absorbed by the earth again. Very few Sabine returned to claim their gods once they moved into the city walls.

On the shelf of Safinia’s small shrine, she knew, were the skins of a few fruits in varying stages of becoming sludge, flowers, and little things—a stone Safinia liked the shape of, a chipped spearhead. She hated seeing the cluttered mass, especially the food. Several years ago, she would have picked her way through the long, sticky grass to check whether these things still sat, unclaimed, between the rough stone figurines that were her family Lares. Now she allowed herself to dawdle—what was the point of hurrying over nothing? The ancestors would not even send a goat to nibble at last season’s olives.

“Useless, all of you,” she told the Lares. She didn’t know their names. “What have you ever done for us?”

Her mother would frown if she saw Safinia mock the ancestor gods. Every spring, she used to offer expensive wines and fruits and pray to come home from the raiding season safely. Safinia would watch her kneeling for what felt like hours, even as the bronze edge of her leg plates must have dug into her skin, before picking up her bags and the same spear Safinia now held to go and join the men of her Century. Even after all of that, the Lares hadn’t helped to save Calliste. She’d taken a knife in the back twelve years ago and left her daughters hungry.

Safinia picked the largest of the figs from the cloth. Her fingernails pierced its soft skin; juice leaked stickily over her hand. She was overdue to hunt—yesterday had been a bust, with only some tree bark to show for hours in the woods, but this morning there had to be some creatures scrounging for breakfast. She wanted to beat any wolves to her snares and see if she could bring home some rabbit.

Figs would give her a little staying power. And she wouldn’t suffer the indignity of watching it rot on the offerings shelf over the next few days. Safinia’s grip grew tighter and the fruit gave up its form, squishing through her fingers.

She opened her palm and stared at the masticated fig. “Whoops.”

Personally, Safinia thought the gods could hardly complain over a squashed offering—but the thought of Attice catching her out embarrassed her. Here she was, whining about figs, when just this little gesture could put her sister’s mind at ease. Sick as she’d been for four years, Attice never complained.

Safinia picked three more figs from the bundle and lined them up on the offerings shelf—penance for having considered stiffing the gods their due. Who knew? Maybe it was by some intervention of the Lares that she hadn’t lost all hope. Things had to turn eventually. It was the way time worked.

Still, as she headed for the woods, hefting her spear and letting her thumb slip by instinct into its soft, well-worn groove, she took great pleasure in eating the squished fruit and licking her fingers. You had to hold back at least a little for yourself. Though ruined, the pulp caught deliciously in her teeth.

As Safinia walked, her thoughts drifted to their mother. Calliste had had three daughters. Attice and Safinia one after the other, then Anesia much later. Calliste herself was famous, or as famous as a soldier could be—plenty of women joined Centuries to raid in the summer and occasionally expand the Sabinum city-states, most of them from the outskirts like Safinia’s family, trained in the spear from a young age. Calliste, though, was the only woman to lead a Century for most of her career, and there hadn’t been another since.

“Never mess with a Safinius,” Mettius, Safinia’s neighbor, had once shouted when she landed a square punch on the nose of a drunk in the city-south. He’d idolized her mother.

Though the middle child, Safinia was Calliste’s natural heir. She took easily to most weapons and even stood in the protective line her neighbors formed when there were raids during her childhood—far from the action, but proud to be close enough to watch. A year or two later, Calliste and their father, Marcus, were killed in the summer raiding season, their bodies barely recovered from the Latin border by a standard-bearer.

It wasn’t all bad. It meant they weren’t alive now to see Safinia failing. She had none of the tactical brilliance of her mother. Only the brute strength.

After their parents died, Attice and Safinia took over raising their little sister. It was a miracle Anesia had managed to develop basic manners and skills necessary to survival—though she was a terrible student in anything that didn’t interest her, which included most chores and weapons. Safinia took her spear into the forest each day, muddling along the trails her father had shown her as a child. Attice took care of the homestead. They lived well enough, even as they watched the old armor, jewelry, weapons that should have been Anesia’s dowry trickle away, stolen or sold. Eventually, though, it all fell on Safinia. Four years ago, after what happened to Attice, she’d made it official, registering in the census as the head of the Safinius clan. Almost no one called her by her personal name, Amaryllis, anymore.

She wondered, sometimes, whether she would have joined her mother’s Century, if Calliste had lived to see Safinia grow old enough for it. She still dreamed, sometimes, of the feeling she imagined Calliste had, when she would wake very early, kiss her three daughters, and pack her things to be blown over the mountains, this way and that, wherever the scent of blood took her.

The Century’s hundred loyal men Safinia could take or leave. They hadn’t been loyal enough to check in on Calliste’s family after she died. In Safinia’s dreams, it was always her, alone.

By the afternoon, Safinia had to concede that she was not returning home with fresh rabbit. They’d gotten too clever for her snares. She should have known—last summer had been brimming with rabbits. That always meant the following year would be a little leaner.

She sat at the base of a tree, sweaty and streaked with dirt. Couldn’t she have a little luck? Something more than figs and bark to live on? Safinia rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to recover some of the good humor she’d had this morning.

There was too much to do for her to be sitting around. Trying to list the day’s chores in her mind only made it grow—she desperately needed a wash but had no clean clothes. And before laundry could be done—an affair that took half the day—she needed to do the mending, or else the process of scraping out stains would make any existing tears worse.

To do the mending, Safinia needed to send Anesia to buy cloth. But they didn’t have anything to trade, not without rabbits. It hadn’t always been like this.

A clear answer stared her in the face, one that she dreaded: Safinia needed to go back to the city for work.

Her hut, and the little cluster of her neighbors, was several miles from the wall. They were too few to be a village, and so were counted as Quirites for the census. That word, though, had taken on an elite cast—a Quirite lived in Cures Sabini proper. They were wealthy, complacent, and untroubled by anything that went on outside the wall. They called Safinia and her neighbors outskirts.

As a teenager, she hadn’t minded. Before Attice was hurt, she and her neighbor Mettius had been fixtures in the city-south.

She smiled despite herself, remembering it. The corner chefs near the south gate carried less pretense than the rest of the city—they were crammed together in tight, meandering streets, no room for courtyards or fancy stools. Their patrons perched on amphorae or simply leaned against the alleyway walls, drinking wine that was little more than vinegar. The men who made passes at Safinia didn’t expect her to be a scrapper, or for Mettius to back her up. In time, they were folded into the fabric of Cures’s nightlife, two gossiped-over oddities—outskirts plebeians who thought they were good enough to drink with Quirites.

Godless and gutless, Mettius called them. But even now he was still drunk in the city most nights, so he couldn’t have hated them too much. It had been a long time since she’d gone with him. The shine had worn off for Safinia, leaving only uncoated resentment.

And yet she couldn’t pretend moral superiority was the only reason she stayed away. Her stomach swooped from nostalgia to dread. There was only one person, realistically, who would see her as more than a lowlife—who might still have work to offer. Her name was Hersilia—she had money, a lot of it, and she’d once offered Safinia a job.

Safinia groaned into her hands. It had been four years since they’d last spoken. Surely tempers would have cooled?

It hadn’t been her fault, Safinia reminded herself. She didn’t have the time anymore to carry on flirting and drinking with girls who would be married off in a few years, anyway, with Safinia still stuck in the same place. She had to grow up.