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VII

It took another hour or two for Tarpeia to be finished with whatever Numa wanted of her. Safinia waited in an alleyway that Tarpeia would have to pass on her way to her home. When she heard the telltale clink of Tarpeia’s jewelry, she stepped into the street and blocked the way.

“Fuck!” Tarpeia hissed. It was nearly dark, and she had neither been offered a guard nor summoned her own. Safinia could tell she felt uneasy by the way she clutched the front of her stola. “Are you trying to fucking kill me?”

“What did he want?” Safinia asked.

“Who?”

“Don’t play games, Tarpeia!” Safinia folded her arms. The skin near her elbows was near bleeding—she’d picked and scratched at it to keep her mind calm. “I don’t trust Numa. What did he tell you after I left?”

“After you were hauled away, after you insulted King Tatius’s closest advisor in his own home? After that?” Tarpeia’s eyes flicked over Safinia, taking in her distress, and relenting a fraction. “He wanted to talk to me about the marriage arrangement Hersilia was working on before she—left. It’s still on, apparently. He did tell me I shouldn’t speak about your delusions or be seen with you hereafter.”

“That’s a given,” Safinia said sarcastically. The rough walls that enclosed the villas had grown cool under her hand. She hit the stone, once, to feel her knuckles scrape against it. “What are we going to do?”

“What are you talking about? I’m going to keep my head down and get married, as I’m meant to. Consider it honoring Hersilia’s wishes for me, if you’re that worked up about it.”

“How can you be so calm?” Safinia demanded. “How can you think this won’t happen to you? And what are they going to do with the girls who aren’t worthy of marriage—me, my sisters?”

“It’s not my problem,” Tarpeia said. “What, am I going to go to war? I could go learn spears with you in the circus—yes, I watched your lesson. Riveting stuff. Give it up, Safinia. He told me your rumors. You can’t stand against Rome yourself. If I were you, I’d start to think about alternatives.”

Safinia glared at her. Tarpeia tried to move around her and she shifted to block passage. “Alternatives?”

“Yes, Safinia, alternatives.” Tarpeia put her heel on Safinia’s instep and pressed her weight slowly down until Safinia yelped. “If you really can’t trust Numa to deal with Rome, then go home and think about what you’ll do when it happens.”

She raised her foot and let Safinia move out of her way. Safinia watched her as she marched on, her shoulders and jaw set. When she was almost out of earshot, Safinia couldn’t help herself. “I thought you loved her,” she called.

Tarpeia halted. Safinia could not read her thoughts from the back of her head. She expected, for a moment, for her to rise to the bait—at least then they could both have someone to yell at. But no—Tarpeia walked on. Safinia followed at a distance just until she could be sure that she’d made it safely home.

Orestilla was still in her workshop when Safinia turned onto her street; lamplight spilled through the open shutters. No one passing by lingered, but a few glanced in, maybe calculating in their heads whether they could afford this or that piece that hung on the far wall for display.

Safinia paused at the sill as she watched Orestilla. The world was gone to her, engrossed in the work of bending wire with her pliers into a lattice studded with gems. The way Orestilla bent over her work, her teeth absently working at her bottom lip and her eyes blind to anything that wasn’t held in front of her face, reminded Safinia of how she felt while hunting—her mind drifted away, so that her hands could get on with their tasks.

After a little while, Orestilla set down the lattice and stretched. That was when she noticed Safinia. “You should have said something.” She smiled and held a hand out to Safinia as she stepped over the window and into the workshop. “This isn’t urgent work.”

“You need a guard,” Safinia said. She was reluctant to drop Orestilla’s hand. “I could have walked in and stolen ten necklaces off the wall.”

“Yes, and you would have been half-killed in the attempt. Look—” She put her hands on Safinia’s shoulders and guided her to lean back out the window; a man she’d taken for a drunk, sitting several doors down on an overturned crate, glanced at them. “There’s another in the other direction. Grandfather doesn’t want guards eyeing down our customers. He’d rather people think we’re so well-off that we can afford to risk doing our work in the open like this.”

“And it’s a busy street, I suppose.” They lowered the shutters together, heavier than Safinia expected—Orestilla’s grandfather certainly believed in some measure of expected security, then. When they were locked, Orestilla turned to Safinia.

“Well? You saw my father?”

There was a little bench for waiting customers near the door. Safinia took it, if only to have a little more time to think while she settled in.

“He offered me things. Food, better place in the allotment,” Safinia said. Then, after a moment’s hesitation: “But it was clear in return I had to stop telling anyone about Rome.”

Orestilla’s nose wrinkled. “Why would he do that?”

Safinia’s heart squeezed in sympathy for Orestilla. Even she could not reconcile the Numa she’d met with the way Hersilia used to speak of him. He often took her advice, asked for it sometimes, even consulted her on diplomatic and legal proposals. She was his heir. Even if she could have pretended that Hersilia was delusional, Livy had confirmed their relationship. If it were startling for Safinia, it would be terrible for Orestilla to grasp.

“Ores,” she said. “Numa would have known the moment Hersilia disappeared who took her. He might have delivered her himself.”

“No,” Orestilla answered. “Not possible. Rome is a barbarian nation. It would be like giving her to a bandit king. You must have misunderstood.”

Safinia closed her eyes. “He told me that my . . . rumor spreading, it could get back to Romulus and sour a friendship between Cures and Rome.”

“Friendship—what friendship?” Orestilla began to pace back and forth past her worktable. With the breeze shuttered away, the shop was stuffy. “Rome and Cures don’t have a friendship, unless you count the rapists and thieves exiled to there.”