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“You should have done it,” the governor said.

“His ‘offer’ was a life in the dirt,” Acron yelled. “He told me he was the son of a god, and my daughters would only know greatness in Rome. Delusions!”

“Did Romans take Hersilia?” Safinia asked.

“Life in the dirt would be greater than whatever you give them in your backwater, mud-made town!” the governor yelled back.

“Hersilia and Sylvia and Orestilla’s friends,” she whispered. Quintus and Livy still held her arms. A good thing, too—otherwise Safinia might fall to the suddenly unsteady ground beneath her.

Acron launched himself at the governor and caught Faustus in the shoulder instead, as he stepped forward to intervene. Immediately, a mess of guards and men fell upon each other, a better brawl than any Safinia had thrown herself into in the city-south.

“Romans,” Safinia said again.

“Yes, we heard,” Livy said. His mouth was a grim line. “Please keep yourself together. I think we might forgo speaking with Faustus about those marriage proposals, but we need to get out of town immediately. The governor will need to carry out that execution tomorrow morning—tonight, even—if he wants to look powerful and in control by the time the plebeians get word of what’s happened to Caenina. Quintus?”

“Right,” Quintus said. “I can get your bags from the guest house. I doubt anyone is at the house gates right now: Go that way and wait for me in the temple district. I’ll try to get Faustus out of there to help, too.”

The brawl was winding up as quickly as it had broken out. Men on either side hauled combatants off each other, though a loud chorus of wailing from the Caeninenses children could not be quieted. It all seemed like it was happening behind a wall, indistinct and separate from Safinia.

Quintus gave her a point and a shove in the direction of the rest of the city, dark and sullenly still, and scurried off.

“Safinia,” Livy said quietly. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.”

She was. Nothing hurt, not even her head. She’d been well-fed at dinner, was well-dressed in comfortable clothes. She was behind a big wall, in a city that would need more than one Century’s worth of men to overrun it. Her hands, though, shook. She turned them palm-up in front of her and tried to make them still—but they wouldn’t. In the half-light, the dark that refused to mix with the flame of torchlight, her fingernails looked dirty—bloody, as if she’d scratched deep into a man’s skin to keep him off her. She could still smell the smoke from that little village on the way here; women had been taken from there, too.

IV

They reached the Temple of Minerva on eerily quiet streets. Safinia sat heavily on the steps, the same she’d been paraded on—when, earlier that day? It didn’t seem possible. The stone was still stained with ox blood.

“It could not be the Romans, you know,” Livy said, breaking the silence.

“I don’t see how.” Safinia rubbed her temples. A familiar dullness spread in her body, blocking out the extremes of her emotion. “I don’t want to imagine there is more than one nation going around proposing marriage and kidnapping brides.”

“It’s just—” Livy began to pace. Safinia watched his shoes, scuffed with dirt, move here to there over and over again. “Why do it this way, if they need brides? One at a time? It’s hardly efficient.”

“Try rephrasing,” Safinia warned.

“I’m sorry, but I’m only thinking logically. You in Cures call it a barbarian nation, Romulus a thug king—warriors don’t scheme like this, they take what’s in front of them. Something must be pulling his strings.”

In Cures, Rome was seen as less a kingdom and more an outpost for thieves and rapists. They would participate in the Sabine Games for the first time this summer, but the consensus was that the invitation was not so much an acknowledgment of peerage as it was an opportunity to remind Romulus how pathetic his men were.

What had Livy said before? Once people have dug in, they’re hard to dig out. They’d been a problem Safinia’s whole life, and some of her mother’s. She remembered Calliste one fall, home from summer raiding and looking uncharacteristically exhausted. Anesia, only two, was sleeping on her chest. “I’m getting too old,” she murmured. Safinia paused playing with some beads on the floor near the hearth. “Soon everyone will be fighting like Romans. It’s too brutal.”

Every exiled man from Sabinum would have gone right to them; the same in Latium and Etruria. Twenty years of this. Safinia’s stomach sunk with dread. There was no way they were just a village, as she’d imagined.

Livy picked at the skin of his lips, still pacing. She was disconcerted by how far she felt from guessing what he was thinking—all night it had been like that, which was jarring for her after the understanding they’d developed together in the woods.

“Livy,” she prompted. “Tell me all you know of Rome.”

He stopped, looking up at her in surprise, as if he’d forgotten she was there. Then he turned, facing the roads that would lead out of Crustumerium and pace the Allia into the Tiber Valley. “Until now, there was nothing worth telling.”

The sky grayed; Safinia watched the east for the sliver of warm light that would tell them it was time to take leaving into their own hands. Just as she was about to suggest to Livy that they move somewhere less conspicuous, Faustus appeared. He had Safinia’s bow and spear, and both their bags.

“Can’t believe you carried this much from Cures,” he said, setting them down heavily.

“Don’t blame me,” said Safinia. “Are you alright?”