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“Outskirts,” Hersilia said firmly. “Your kind get funnier the farther out you go from Cures—you’ve absorbed more Etruscan traditions than the rest of Sabinum. Though believe me, if I could have pulled this scheme off with Veii, I would have. The point remains. All the real change comes from the council, in the cities. It would come from the king, if he weren’t too chickenshit to wield it. The women behind the wall are constrained. They aren’t much more than property. If I can liberate them, I must.”

She believed it, Safinia realized. She loved her plan, and her peers, and it wasn’t that she didn’t think Safinia and her sisters needed saving—it was that she hadn’t thought about them at all. Their lives wouldn’t change, even if the council was made up of women. But they would bear all of Hersilia’s mistakes. Safinia thought of the soot-streaked, terrified survivors from Caenina. She closed her eyes. “I cannot let you betray Cures to Rome.”

“Cures betrayed itself.”

“No.” Safinia shook her head. She wanted to pull her hands over her face and block out the world. But she put her hand close to her boot, sick clarity felt in the space between her fingers and the hilt stuffed against her leg. “Because of you, Romans burned Caenina. They took the governor’s daughter in Crustumerium. She hasn’t even started her bleeds.”

Hersilia avoided Safinia’s eye. “Her husband knows to wait until she can bear children.”

“What happened to you?” Safinia’s voice cracked. “I’m begging you to tell me you hit your head. You can’t build a nation this way. You can’t.”

“I am willing to sacrifice for a better world. I will give every daughter of Cures to this cause if I have to. Their descendants will deify me for it. They will worship us for what we build for them.”

“Us?”

“Yes, us.” Hersilia stood and kicked the door ajar. Her guard stood at attention. Safinia could see by the way he hovered at her shoulder that she had her hooks well into him. She didn’t dare reach for her knife with his unsheathed. She could only take him if he was unaware.

“You have a choice now, Safinia,” Hersilia said. “Build this with me. I told you long ago I had plans for you—you’re the daughter of a legend. You could be my general, enforce my will in the city. You’ll want for nothing.”

Safinia laughed harshly. “Will you give me to a Roman, too?”

Hersilia’s hesitation was answer enough. She tried to recover; “You would be a match for Hostius. When he learns of your mother’s battles, he will respect you.”

“Never.” Safinia’s stomach surged with revulsion.

“That’s fine too,” Hersilia said. “He’ll be just as happy with Orestilla.”

“Fuck you,” Safinia spat. “She isn’t yours to give.”

Safinia could see Hersilia’s walls come up. Something in her face shifted. “I’d hoped you would feel differently,” she said. “Since it means your life, and that of your sisters.”

Safinia forgot the danger and threw herself at Hersilia. Her guard was too quick for her, opening a shallow slash over her face, cutting into one eyebrow, and as she winced, he slammed and held the door shut as someone replaced the heavy metal bar that closed it. Safinia screamed her fury, a horrible, primal thing that ripped through her body and roughened her throat. She slammed the flat of her hand on the door.

Hersilia was still there. She could see her feet as shadows under the door. Safinia threw herself against it, and the shadows flinched back.

“I have time to wait,” Hersilia called through the door. “This is your destiny, Safinia. Answer it and be something to history.” Then the heavy footfall of her guards, drowning out the soft sound her slippers made on stone.

Safinia pounded at the door until her knuckles split open again. At least Hersilia had left the candle. She could see her own hands battered by what she’d refused. She closed them into fists and slid to a seat. I’ll get out, she told herself, breathing hard. I’ll tell everyone. I’ll save everyone. Maybe she could have pretended to go along, and made a break for the road when Hersilia released her. But Hersilia never would have left her unguarded, not until she was truly broken. And in all that time, Safinia would have to live with that reality.

She busied herself finding the twine that had cut into her hands and tying it around her neck, returning Livy’s ring to its place. It made her feel as solid and heavy as gold. The flickering light turned her shadow into a towering thing. Only an illusion.

Hersilia did not return, but Safinia was fed, just enough to keep her hunger from dominating all her senses. The first platter of food had a salve on it for her sores. Hersilia’s apology. Safinia threw it at the wall and it shattered; a few hours later, worried about infection, she recovered what she could, clinging in globs to the shards of the pot it had come in. The relief was stinging and immediate and made Safinia hiss.

She worried constantly that they would cease to bring her food. She had no way of knowing whether the handfuls of grain she chewed in between meals contained parasites. It felt like eating gravel. Her gums bled.

How many days had she been in Rome? It had taken a day to travel down the Tiber, and it couldn’t have been less than two or three days since being locked away. Beyond that, her sense of time was muddled. She could only mark the hours it took for the candle Hersilia left behind to burn to a fizzle. The rest passed in a blur. Safinia ceased all efforts to pray.

III

The next guards that came to the door didn’t announce themselves. They simply opened it, and though Safinia was caught by surprise, tumbling into the hallway, a brief scuffle ensued as she tried to break away. It ended with her hands retied behind her back and her hair yanked back. One man held a knife to her neck.

“Vappa,” she hissed at them. Scum. They laughed at her.

“That’s good Latin,” one of them said. “I hope you are one of the brides.”

She expected them to bring her to Hersilia. Instead, they marched her through the hallways—she tried desperately to keep track of what turns they took, and which panels on the painted walls were actually doors—and brought her to the blessed outside. Safinia began to cry. It was involuntary—the breeze of a cool afternoon, the sun overhead, best of all, tufts of grass on the hillside. She had thought she would never feel it again.

She was half-carried to a rocky overhang that met the city’s gates to the east. A big man stood there, waiting for them, and surveying all that happened outside Rome’s walls. He turned his head as they approached.