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Cures Sabini was as bustling as on any other day, but today it choked Safinia, made her feel pressed in on all sides. Practically everyone should have been as hungover and moody as she was—they should have been fretting over the Romans and swearing never to drink again. But they were as cheerful and busy as ever. When the gate came into view, Safinia practically ran to it. Only the sight of her home, just for a little while, would make her feel calm again.

Thunder rolled, distant, over the hills. She didn’t mind the rain as she left the city behind. Fog drifted between mountain peaks, making strange islands of them. Safinia tipped her head back and breathed it in: wet, dirt, the slightly metallic taste of humidity. Her feet wiggled in the soft earth.

She didn’t know why she was so compelled to make Numa answer for Rome. What, really, could she do? Her life was small against the immensity of the land; his was only a little bigger. She could kill him, or leave him alone, or walk on from this point until she collapsed from exhaustion in some unknown land, in Lucus Feroniae, maybe, and nothing would have changed about the forest or the mountains.

No, a small voice told her. No, you have to try anyway. No one else had seen the mad look in Numa’s eye. It was the same way she had felt when she realized Attice would never return to herself, not completely. The mountains had been just as immutable then, and Safinia just as determined to wear them down.

This time, though, she had help. There’d still been no sign of Livy—he must still be in Rome, looking for Hersilia—but Safinia drew his ring out from her clothes and held it tightly in her fist.

“Janus, keeper of doorways,” she murmured. Livy’s ring was in the well of a shrine to Feronia, drenched in rabbit’s blood. “Blood for him to hear my prayer. Vesta to seal this message in smoke.”

She thought she felt something, a prickling on the back of her neck. These sacrifices were enough for Feronia; they should be enough for Livy. She’d tried burning the ring, holding it scorching in her hand—a small, circular burn now puffy in her palm—burying the ring under a tree, submerging the ring in a bowl of spring water, then another of rainwater. Nothing worked; Safinia had never gone out of her way to do witchcraft. Her workings were from half-remembered stories.

She sighed and reached into the well, taking the ring and wiping it clean on her tunic. She replaced its absence with entrails, lest Feronia be offended at the co-opting of her shrine.

“You’re useless to me,” she told the ring, holding it to her eye and looking through it at the trees. “I can’t make you call to him. I can’t even eat you.”

“Imagine the stomachache,” someone said from behind her.

Safinia whirled around. She was almost to her feet when she recognized the man, his beard a little longer than the last time she had seen him. “It’s just you,” she told Timaeus.

“You sound disappointed.”

“No—I just thought you were at the grove. I haven’t seen you since I left.”

Timaeus took a seat next to her and offered her nuts from an unwrapped cloth. “Are we hunting today?”

She shook her head. “I’m not in a mood to carry game all the way back to the city. We’re living there now.”

“You don’t sound happy about it.”

“No,” Safinia said. “It’s by necessity. You saw the Romans?”

“I saw the Romans,” Timaeus said. She liked the way he spoke, his mild observations that invited her to share or not share—to ask him to elaborate, or not. His was a life led entirely on his own terms. Safinia envied that. “You’re concerned they’re not entirely gone,” he remarked.

“I’m concerned no one else seems concerned,” Safinia said. “They still believe their councilors and king will take care of things.”

Timaeus smiled at that. “When I lived a very different life, I found myself thinking the same thing. About Rome. None of my contemporaries believed they would have much of an impact on the world.”

“You’re a philosopher, aren’t you?” Safinia had heard of these. They were a Greek invention, though some Etruscans claimed the title, too. People with so much accommodated for them already that they could consider the mysteries of the world. “Where do you get your news, anyway?”

He smiled enigmatically. “I have many friends besides you. And I have not been a philosopher in a long time. Sit and join me for lunch, Safinia—tell me about Rome.”

She obliged. Timaeus was a good listener, and if he suspected that she left parts of the story out, he didn’t press her. She trusted Timaeus as much as she trusted her neighbors, but some of the things she’d seen—Livy, in particular—were too strange to try to explain. By the time she got to Numa, Timaeus was frowning, tugging on his wiry beard.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

Timaeus turned his frown toward the meandering gaps between the canopy overhead. He was deep in thought. “I don’t trust my own advice on this,” he said. “But if you would like, we could consult the auspices.”

She’d known he was an augur—a lituus always hung from his belt—but he’d never before offered to read for her. “Yes,” she said. “Please.”

Timaeus stood, brushing off his pants, and offered a hand to Safinia.

She followed him through the trees as they turned hardscrabble and small, clinging to the mountainside. Soon they reached a south-facing ridge. From here, Safinia could see the Tiber snaking through the hills. The sun shone brightly into her eyes. Timaeus watched the land, his dark eyes unreadable.

“I’ll tell you what I know of time. There are two ways my people describe it—chronos, and kairos. Chronos is quantifiable, the measured memory of our lives from one event to the next. Kairos is more abstract. It doesn’t mean time so much as the right time.” He tugged on his beard. “Humans are young and die young. We don’t live long enough to see the long curve of time. We need the help of the wild, and the patterns it reveals to us, to capture kairos—the right time to act.”

Safinia looked at her hands, familiar and scraped. Was the smeared scab on her knuckles an echo of the future, or was blood just blood? “By all means,” she said, stuffing her hands into her armpits. “Show me some kairos.”