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Dark came. Twice, she attempted to silently climb down—the idiots hadn’t even posted a watch—and twice the branches creaked underneath her feet. She settled for moving one bough down for every hundred count of quiet. Eventually, finally, she reached lower, thicker branches and was able to drop herself down to the ground.

Her heart was in her mouth as she pressed her back to the tree trunk. The closest man was ten or fifteen steps away. She was well within the sphere of their torchlight.

Where was her spear? It should have been right at the base of this tree. They shouldn’t have noticed it with its worn leather sheath—it would have blended in with the leaves, unless they knew to look for it. But it wasn’t here. Could she have dropped it farther? She didn’t dare feel around.

It had been her mother’s. One of the only things she still owned that had been held by Calliste.

Safinia dug a fingernail into her palm to keep herself focused. She could not stick around waiting for one of these barbarians to wake up for a piss.

When she’d picked her way out of the firelight, she ran, hoping her skittish gait could be taken for a deer, if anyone was awake to listen. She chose what she hoped was the direction she’d seen smoke. No one ever doubled back the morning after a raid.

The smell of sodden, half-burned wood, of blood and bloated bodies, made Safinia nauseous. Eventually she could go no closer, the raided village somewhere ahead; she feared the angry ghosts of the dead. Safinia collapsed. She was far enough, she was safe for now. She would look for Livy in the morning.

She prayed, her hand and cheek pressed in rich black soil, that the dead would find the passage to the underworld that no living Sabine could remember, and leave her in peace. Her body shook, thinking on what she’d just escaped. It was said that no women lived in Rome. None except the ones they dragged there by the hair.

When she awoke, Safinia realized she was much closer to the village than she expected. It could not even be called a village, really—there were three huts ahead, nestled on one side by an outcropping of rock. No more than a few families had lived here and were more isolated than any similar cluster in the Cures outskirts. They might have been Feronia cultists, like her, to be living so remotely.

A man stood, surveying the damage. Safinia’s body tensed—but then registered that he was dressed in blue silks, dripping with jewelry.

“Livy,” she called hoarsely.

He turned, trotting over to help her to her feet and hand her a hunk of bread spread with cheese. He had her pack—she’d forgotten about it completely—and her mother’s spear.

“Thank you,” Safinia said.

“It doesn’t bear mentioning. Come this way. I want your read on what’s happened, to see if it aligns with my notes.”

She obeyed. Something about Livy’s nonresponse to the night they’d just endured settled Safinia’s nerves—but what came next was a deep sadness. Three bodies were tossed in a crude palisade dug out of a natural ditch. One was small, a boy of thirteen or fourteen, she reckoned.

Safinia stuffed her hands into her armpits and squared her shoulders. The raid didn’t look like anything unusual; the roofs of all three huts were burned, their mud-packed walls crumbled in places.

The most intact of them still had a tattered curtain drawn over the threshold. Safinia added a fourth body to her tally; a foot was visible inside.

She stepped in before she could stop herself. A woman stared back at her, long dead. Her throat was slashed. Safinia picked up her hand—stiffening had not yet set in, but it would soon. There was blood under the woman’s fingernails. Attice’s had looked the same, after.

Anger spread in Safinia’s body like tangled roots, choking as it grew. She had walked away from the men who did this, sleeping and helpless. She’d let them walk away from her. Her body trembled as she tried to summon some rational, reasonable thought—that it would have been suicide to attack even one of them, that they were hardened criminals, even if they were clumsy about it.

That she was small. Strong only for a woman. Had lost more fights in the city-south than she cared to admit. Only this thought broke through her anger: She was too useless to have been any help, anyway.

Safinia touched the woman’s eyelids and slid them closed. “I’m sorry, sister,” she said. “Let Janus and Vesta bear you to the next place.”

Outside, Livy had one of his fancy handkerchiefs delicately held to his mouth and nose. “We should get moving, unless you want to rest today and camp here tonight.”

“You’re insane,” Safinia snapped. “I’m not camping with ghosts.”

“Spare me a sharp tongue, please. I’m only trying to be of help.”

Safinia’s shoulders slumped. A songbird lit on the precipice of one of the huts; she watched it with a dull pain in her chest. “We don’t have the time to burn them. Even if we did, the raiders might see the smoke and turn around.”

“Look there.” Livy pointed to some muddled tracks that led the other way out of the village toward the edge of the forest. “Some may have gotten away. We’ll just have to hope that they return to do funerary rites for their dead. Which, incidentally, is a topic in my research we haven’t yet covered . . .”

Safinia closed her eyes. “Livy.”

“Right, yes, later on. It is upsetting. Uncivilized, to leave the dead splayed out. Who do you think did it?”

“Romans,” she said. She waved her hand at one of the dead men. “Those are sword wounds.”

“Not Roman. Couldn’t be.”