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“I have every intention. But it’ll only happen after you listen.”
Safinia stared at the sliver of light from the hallway. Hersilia spoke as if she were trying to calm an animal: smooth, low, and gentle. She wanted badly to let that soothing sound wrap around her and make her docile, but—she thought of Sylvia, the girl from Crustumerium. The grief in Quintus’s face swam in her memory—and the bloodstain of a slave who happened to be in the way.
The girls from Caenina were young, too. Safinia pressed her eyes shut. “What about the others?”
“What others?”
Safinia yanked her hands from Hersilia’s grip, lashing out with one leg so that she would have no choice but to release. “The other girls, Queen of Rome. Is this their design, too?”
“Don’t do that again,” Hersilia warned. “The other girls know what’s at stake. They’re all fine and are being treated well. Are you going to listen, or are you going to kick me? This is your last chance. I don’t want to have to bind your wrists again.”
The thought of more coarse rope around the sores of her wrist, fibers tangled with blood, was too agonizing. Weak! Safinia told herself. But she couldn’t do it. Not if she would only be forced to sit here and listen either way. “Fine,” she said through her teeth. “Talk.”
“There. I’m glad you can be sensible about this.” A flicker of disappointment passed Hersilia’s face—she was not nearly as good as her father at masking herself. Her thoughts were relentless and always landed in her eyes or the twitch of her lips. “I don’t want you to be so angry with me.”
“What do you expect?” Safinia asked. She was exhausted, hungry, bleeding. Hersilia sat between her and escape. Worst—her lips still felt swollen and too thoroughly kissed. “Why would you do this? Why Romulus?”
“Because like it or not, it would happen one way or another,” Hersilia said. “You of all people must see that Cures is doomed to fall. I have done the only thing that may save it, before we are sacked and trafficked and scattered into the hands of invaders.”
“What else are Romans?”
“Would you like to say more of your piece?” Hersilia betrayed exasperation, which only made the anger simmering in Safinia’s belly stoke hotter. “From where I’m sitting, I’d say it’s very, very lucky that my father went through the trouble of bringing you here when his first instinct was to simply kill you.”
“You would allow it,” Safinia said hotly. “You come in here and tell me you’ve been thinking about me for years, but you would stand aside and let him kill me if he wanted to.”
“Yes, I would.”
For a moment, they both stopped—Hersilia looked stricken by her own words. But she recovered faster than Safinia, holding her hands tightly in her lap. “I may love you, but the world is bigger than you. I intend to do well by it. If it means I have to lose you in the process, I will.” She looked down at her hands. “I don’t want to.”
I may love you. She’d wanted to hear that so badly, once. Now it felt like a liability.
“Go on, then,” Safinia said dully. The fight was drained from her, for now. “Tell me how you are doing good.”
Hersilia looked like she wanted to say more, but something in Safinia’s expression stopped her. She sighed once, a small huff. “Fine. You’ve been told, I imagine, that the Romans have decided to surrender and pledge loyalty to King Tatius?”
“It’s a lie.”
“Of course it’s a lie. That anyone in Cures would believe it is proof we are ripe for plucking. Romulus doesn’t surrender, and neither do his men. You’ve always said that a wounded animal is the most dangerous—that they’ll fight without regard to their own lives. Rome wars in that way. They aren’t like the Latins. They have no self-preservation. Each one will gladly die in the cause of salting our farms and raping our women.
“And what do we have to defend ourselves? A soft king, and a soft city. I know what you think of the wall. I think it, too. The higher it builds, the more indestructible my peers feel. They’re fools. They think anything can happen to the outskirts, and they’ll be happy and fed and safe as long as the gates are shut.”
Safinia shook her head. “The king commands five Centuries in Sabinum. And the Quirites aren’t helpless without them.”
“We are,” Hersilia snapped. “And King Tatius is a daft old man who no more knows how to command a hundred men than he knows how to fuck them. After his son died, my father begged him to remarry, or to name an heir from the council. He won’t. He thinks when he dies it’ll be settled reasonably without any fuss, and all will be well. But it won’t. What’ll happen, Safinia?”
Safinia didn’t answer. Hersilia whistled, sharply, like an irate instructor. “Come on, daughter of Calliste. What happens when King Tatius dies?”
“It doesn’t make a difference to my family,” Safinia said. “Am I supposed to worry that the allotments will stop? Ours is a pittance—we eat if I bring food home.”
“And when Romulus sees that we are weak, and comes up the salt road with his army? Will he pass your hut with a wave?”
Safinia set her jaw and said nothing.
“This is the difference between you and me.” Hersilia sagged in her seat, her resolve faltering into tiredness for just a moment. “You act like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, but it’s just two people. My father and I are charged with saving all of Cures, maybe all of Sabinum. When the king is dead, the treasury will be in shambles. Ambitious governors will peel away and start their own kingdoms. Half the army will break for their homes rather than stay to fight uncertain civil wars. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring these problems.”
“You have the luxury of slaves,” Safinia said. Heat rose in her cheeks—she wouldn’t let Hersilia call her problems small. “You have the luxury of domestici and guards. You have so much excess that you spend it on jewelry and vases, not food.”
“And yet if you shirk your obligations, two suffer. If I or my father do, thousands. It isn’t the same, Safinia. Are you interested in hearing the rest?”
