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“That night,” Livy said. “He enjoyed her. Forcefully.”

“We have a word for that already,” Safinia murmured.

Livy was quiet a moment. “Yes, alright. He raped her.”

Lucretia, Livy said, was not only beautiful, but virtuous beyond imagination. The total model of a wife. While the other women drank or gossiped when their husbands were at war, Lucretia only spun or carded wool, pining and praying for her husband’s safety. When Sextus came to her, his big hand on her slender neck, she considered death. But if she died, there would be no witness to this crime. So she endured, her eyes fixed on a point in the ceiling.

Once Sextus left, Lucretia called her father and husband home, and a larger audience besides, of powerful men who had reason to fear and hate the king. She recounted her rape, and then announced herself as irrevocably stained.

Safinia was almost too angry for words. Her eyes sprang open. “Bullshit.”

“The men there must have made the same face as you,” Livy said. “But Lucretia was so virtuous that she could not accept absolution. Whether or not by choice, she was made impure.”

“What did she do?”

Livy’s eyes were glittering black in the low light. Safinia had trouble fixing on them. “She drove a dagger into her chest and bled to death.”

Safinia exhaled, trying to breathe her swirling head clear. Attice’s captors were close in her mind. Their faces never quite left her. Especially the burned one; the eye set deep within his charred flesh going still. He deserved it, she thought. They both did.

Time compressed in Safinia’s head; she found herself stumbling outside, drinking the cool night air into her lungs like it was water for her thirst. Livy, apparently tired out by his storytelling, snored away inside. She’d found the words to protest it smothered in her chest. Her mind was too blurred to remember how to turn them into sound and push them out of her lungs.

He probably wouldn’t welcome her thoughts on the story of Lucretia. Livy was like many of Hersilia’s friends, consumed with an arbitrary, intangible currency. Virtue. Men like Livy could imagine no other reason for a woman to kill herself after being raped than the loss of it.

Wind swept the hills, rippled the grass. Safinia fell into it. The dirt was cool, full of moisture, teeming with the potential for life. She wondered if the family that left this place now missed it. She surely would, if she left her hut and moved to Cures. Though the soil there at home was not as soft in her fingers, not as black, leaving traces like soot in her palms. She tried to match her breathing to the ground.

There were better reasons to kill yourself. Pain, something felt, not imposed like virtue, that was a reason. Tangible enough that it terrified Safinia. The thought had occurred to her before, when one deadened day bled into the next, and the next—Why not simply die? And if it had occurred to her, it had surely occurred to Attice. For a time, a very brief one, after bringing Attice home, Safinia had picked fights in the city-south without telling anyone where she was going. Only once did it go so far that she thought she might actually be killed—and then, of course, her mind exploded with fear that must have been fighting to surface all along.

Safinia painted the soil onto her cheeks, black in the shape of a dragged hand. She was aware that she could hurt worse than she already had. Lucretia had felt it, too. She heard Livy’s voice echo in her head, as he finished the story, before he’d gone to sleep as easily as a tired child.

“Everyone who heard of Lucretia’s death was furious, obviously,” Livy said. “It was the beginning of the end for the tyrant king Tarquin the Proud. He and his family were exiled and scattered and the era of kings ended. After that, citizens elected consuls by vote, and thus became a republic.

“And all for one woman.”

II

They found a slow, shallow bend in the Allia River before Crustumerium’s gates—Livy insisted here that they clean themselves before going any farther. They separated to wash; the water ran cool over Safinia’s legs, scratched with brambles and insect bites. Heat and humidity had been waiting for them as soon as they descended the Apennines—Safinia took her time bathing, even undoing the tangled rope that had become her braid, wetting and oiling it with the perfumed stuff from one of Livy’s little pots, before spinning it back into a plait and pinning it to her head. Anesia would have been proud.

Livy was waiting for her close to the road. He looked splendid, in a bright red toga, with a dark cape fastened to his shoulder with a gleaming brooch. Even his sandals were different, stamped with intricate designs. Safinia looked down at her chiton—the hem was fraying, and beating it clean at the river had done little for the stains.

“I hope the governor agrees to see me,” she said. “Crustumerium pledges to King Tatius, but a lot of Latins live there. They’re more conservative about dress and things.”

Livy snorted. “It would be hard to be less conservative than Cures.”

“Not so,” Safinia said. Her mother told her that in Etruria, women feasted alongside men at state dinners and sometimes served on councils. In Sabinum, as in Latium, men and women separated for formalities. “You haven’t seen Cures during the festivals. We know how to be proper, then.”

“Ah, yes, propriety, best known as a garment you sling to the corner of the room when you’re done with it,” Livy said. “Embrace your rough-and-tumble nature, Safinia. History is plain on your people’s love for carousing.”

“You make us sound like Romans,” she complained.

Livy smirked. “Even so. I’ve been waiting for you to take an interest in looking like a proper, virtuous woman. I have a gift for you. Green, since I refuse to put you in black and you take issue with proper colors.”

He produced from his pack a length of deep green silk, trimmed in gold, and a woven belt to match. It was long—folded like a chiton, it would reach her ankles. For the sake of propriety, it was not as good as a proper stola but much better than the short tunic Safinia wore now—and it would still allow her range of movement. She eyed Livy. His placid smile told her this was a battle she would not win. Safinia had to admit, once she had the garment tied, that it was the finest thing she’d ever worn, including the time Hersilia had insisted on having her fitted for the household uniform.

Livy looked her over as she returned. “You’re a proper woman after all,” he said.

“Say that again and I’ll change it to a toga. It’s my right to wear one.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, patriarch de facto and all. You really should have been born a boy, Safinia. Then we wouldn’t have to sort out all this nonsense about Etruscan inheritance customs. These things should be standardized by city-state, no matter how close you are to a border.”