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“Are you crazy? You just told me not to go alone.”

“I’m not you.”

Safinia stood, too, reaching instinctively to block his way. As she gripped his shoulder, a strange thing happened—the same nagging eeriness as earlier, when she’d slapped him, overcame her. She could see her hand against him, feel the weight of it and the folds of his toga—but her mind still tried to tell her it wasn’t real. “What . . . ?”

He stepped demurely to the side, out from under her grasp. “I have ways of avoiding being seen, if it eases your mind. It takes someone rare to perceive me.”

“But . . .” He’d hiked with her. Left boot prints. Lifted tablets, collected wild onions for her on the way. “What are you?”

Livy made a sound like a frustrated animal. “Not a witch, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not carrying around curse tablets or talking to the dead. Unless that helps you wrap your head around it, in which case, I am.”

“It doesn’t,” Safinia said automatically. Their banter was still there. He was still Livy at least. “Are you a god?”

At this, he smiled broadly. “Like I said, I’m a historian, Safinia. It means I get to write my own rules. Travel safe, and I’ll see you in a few days.”

And then he slipped out the storehouse door, leaving Safinia agape. Her hand reached into her shirt and curled around Livy’s ring, as solid as his flesh was not.

The merchants who met Safinia at the storehouse weren’t happy to take on a job smuggling. Faustus had seemed confident in their loyalty, but she threw herself into working alongside them to encourage them to keep their word—and whatever payment Faustus had thrown in on her behalf. She kept Livy’s ring tucked away but gifted them the leg plates she’d stolen from her quickly put-together Crustumerium parade armor. That seemed to appease them.

Once the goods were loaded and the caravan hooked up, Safinia crawled inside and flattened herself against the flooring, half-tucked under a heavy sack of grain. Her legs cramped as she waited for them to pass through the gates; eventually she could hear Faustus’s muffled voice, laced with anxiety, allowing them on, and the rocking of the road lulled Safinia into her first sleep in almost a day and a half.

She dreamed that by a river, a wolf found two human babies, abandoned. Safinia watched as the she-wolf licked one, perplexed by its shape and curiosity: The first of the babies reached his tiny hand for her fur and she let him.

Quintus, Safinia thought. What about Quintus? He’d seen and talked to Livy. What was so special about him?

The dream continued. She was on a hill, watching birds. All she saw were starlings, beginning their evening murmuration. They swooped as one, spiraling into a narrow point and exploding again into a massive, winged beast. This is what it meant to be powerful. But in the dream, Safinia heard someone come up behind her. Some other man’s feelings welled up inside her. She didn’t want to be a starling. She wanted to matter. “Well?” the newcomer asked.

“Twelve,” Safinia answered in a voice that was not her own. “I saw twelve vultures.”

The caravan rolled over a bump in the road and Safinia was jolted instantly awake. Clutched in her fist once again was the ring—she didn’t remember pulling it out of her shirt. It was hot to the touch, far too hot to be from her body heat alone. Quintus had held the ring, too, she remembered. And then he’d seen Livy, just the same as her. That night, in Hersilia’s office, had he been there, unnoticed, watching until she’d picked the ring up off the floor?

She ran her thumb over the design on its top, the engraving sharp on the whorl of her skin.

V

Once the caravan turned her loose, the hike back to Cures Sabini passed in a blur. A runner could make Antemnae to Cures in half a day; Safinia was forced by the evening to concede that it would take her a little longer, unless she wanted to risk setting a breakneck pace in the wrong direction. When she was too exhausted to stay on her feet, she hurled her satchel into a tree and curled up at its foot.

Would any Romans looking for Orestilla ask around, and then find her with Attice and Anesia? Safinia kept remembering Sylvia’s murdered slave. It soothed her to focus more on the present dangers of her life than to mull over the mystery Livy represented. Maybe Livy was a delusion. She’d heard of people’s minds breaking such that they saw things that weren’t there.

It’s all I need, she thought. To go mad right now.

There was no one to keep her mind occupied, or to reassure her of her safety. Her thoughts spun.

Any hour now she would reach the woods she knew. She still walked through the trees as a stranger.

Sweat rolled down her nose. Safinia hung her head between her knees. The last time she’d pushed herself this hard, she’d been looking for Attice. The world had seemed a windstorm to her tired eyes, sometimes sharpening to clarity at the sight of a boot print, a piece of bark pulled recently from a tree. She hadn’t eaten enough then, either.

That night, four years ago, the men must have known that she was following, because they led her in circles; she reached them before they crossed the Tiber, on the third night of her pursuit—that distance should have taken only half a day.

Bile rose in her throat at the memory. She’d been half-dead from exhaustion by the time she caught up, launching herself into the two men when they were drunk and confident they’d lost her. She remembered falling, punching her spear like an awl into a man’s back, his skin shredding and her hand slipping as the tip hit bone. The second man almost killed her, snapping her collarbone under his bootheel and kicking in her ribs, before she tripped him and held him against the coals of his fire. When he stopped twitching, she’d turned him over and stabbed him in the gut to make sure he was dead.

She’d only killed beasts, before that night. She put her hand in the wound and felt the warmth rush out of his body. It was awful, so awful that she’d nearly lain down next to Attice, who could’ve been dead but for her shuddering, and given up.

It was one thing to care for a sister, another to shoulder her entirely. But she is alive, Safinia thought fiercely. Her heart beats. And she would do it again, and again if she had to, meting out each precious twitch of muscle and blood—each pulse a victory, in defiance of pain.

“She’s safe,” she said to the trees. If only Livy was still with her, to keep her mind off it. The more time that passed without him, she more she feared he’d been an extended hallucination. But no. She held his ring through her shirt and got up. Not much farther, now.

Safinia returned to the salt road the next evening. Earlier, around lunch, she’d passed a cluster of homes that she knew, and as the sun started its meander west, the tree line abruptly ceased, depositing her back on the beaten path, a mere mile or two from home.