Page 85

“I can’t die,” Livy said. “I will die with Rome, and so never.”

Safinia held his ring up to him. “Is it worth that much to you?”

“Yes,” he said through the blood dripping over his chin.

She slammed it into the wound in his stomach, flesh ripping around her hand as she drove the ring inside his body. Her fingers slipped into the fatty, vascular threads that bound his organs together, snapping some and tangling in the rest. His blood, hotter than a woman’s hair in the sun, gushed on the dirt. Even as his eyes turned blurry and still, his heart beat on, spilled more.

For a moment, with her fingertips inside him, Safinia was assailed by images. The temples Livy had spoken of, towering painted marble. Every hill and valley visible from the forum paneled with rooftops, sprawling with narrow alleyways—it held a million people. Two million, at least. They broke pots and threw the pieces in a pile, covered it in lime to keep it from stinking. They set the city on fire, over and over again, until some part of it was always choked with smoke—it could burn all day and night and the flame could not flatten it, only make it miserable. Rome grew and fell away to ash, was sacked, and came back again, was burned, and rebuilt, flooded, and returned, warred over, warred with, warred from. It rushed over Safinia’s eyes, too fast to understand any of it but the blood that ran the Tiber red, over and over. This was the scope he swore would make her understand. The grandest a city could be. A place for gods.

It was nothing to her. Safinia pulled her hand away, disgusted.

Screams tore the air. Chaos had reached the forum, as people tried to flee. Livy had accomplished one thing—he’d made her too late to interfere. She staggered to her feet, her heart pounding in her ears, her hands gloved with blood.

VII

Panic did not immediately come to the forum. Some must have thought the screams were from tricks gone awry; they didn’t have the vantage point Safinia had. The crowd broke as horses crashed through it and people ran, streaming into the market and forum like water diverting to a trough. A Quirite man, holding hands with a woman, flinched when he saw Safinia’s bloodied hands and face. She still wore her Roman disguise, but it wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Safinia took a breath and forced herself to hold it for a count of three. It wasn’t immediately obvious yet what the Romans were doing—they moved through the Sabine, turning their heads round and round like hawks scanning a field. Then, one reached down from his horse and grabbed a woman by the hair.

They were hunting specific women. Safinia clung to the Capitoline wolf as she watched, trying to find her sisters in the crowd. Romans were targeting any woman in expensive clothes and shiny jewelry—likely women from Hersilia’s original list. For now, they were willing to let plebeians escape to ensure they had the manpower to overtake whatever guards, fathers, boyfriends accompanied the unlucky girls.

Calling for Attice and Anesia would only ruin her voice. She climbed down from the wolf’s platform and fought against the crowd to one of the temples that lined the forum. She could climb its roof and have a better view. A man spotted her and galloped over, leaning out of his seat—Safinia threw her stolen spear, catching him in the neck, and scrambled clear of his rearing horse. The animal flailed into the crowd, eyes rolling, foam dripping from its wide, flat teeth, its rider dead. Safinia yanked at her weapon, but it was bent. She settled for stealing the dead man’s broad, flat sword.

She didn’t feel remorse for killing him—but her stomach rolled. Another angry ghost.

Safinia reached the temple—modest, with a wooden roof and stone dais—and groped for faults in the poorly cut rock to haul herself up. Then—a hand wrapped around her wrist.

“It’s just me,” Tarpeia hissed.

She yanked Safinia onto the dais, shadowed from the action in the forum. She was disheveled—she’d covered her hair in the fashion of a southern Sabine, the veil escaping its pins—but so far unharmed. Safinia opened her mouth—to formulate a plan, maybe, to disguise Tarpeia so that she could escape with her. Then she realized.

“You knew.”

“Yes.” Tarpeia wouldn’t meet Safinia’s eyes. “I’m not going to waste time apologizing. The longer I can avoid Spurius and his guards, the longer you have to get away. It’ll be a free-for-all once they have the girls on Hersilia’s list.”

“I’m supposed to thank you?” Safinia asked. “You could have told someone! You could have prevented this!”

“What could I have done?” A thundering of hooves too close to the dais—Tarpeia pulled Safinia back further. Despite the sharpness in her voice, the hand clutching Safinia’s arm shook. “You’re such a man sometimes. No one was ever going to listen to what I had to say.”

“The women would have. They would have known not to come here.”

“Right, so the men would come alone and get their throats slit, and then there would be no one left to stop Romulus and his men from walking right into Cures and throwing us over their shoulders. I’d have bought us a day.”

“You’re just like her,” Safinia spat. “Selling my sisters to Rome because you’ve decided for all of us that it’s not worth the fight.”

She turned—but Tarpeia clutched tighter, twisted both fists in the fabric of Safinia’s tunic. “Wait. You need to get as many men out of the city as you can. Mettius especially. I’m not like her—I don’t want to die in Rome.”

Safinia wanted to say something biting, sarcastic, but the words died in her chest. This could have gone so differently. Tarpeia could have told Safinia—they could have schemed together, with Orestilla, and found some way to prevent this. Maybe Tarpeia had intended to go along with it until just now. Maybe the danger hadn’t felt real until it was right in front of her. Safinia wanted to be angry at that. But she sighed. She gently dislodged Tarpeia’s hands and held them. “You won’t if you come with me now.”

“No.” Tarpeia turned her face away. Even amidst screaming chaos, she was still too proud to let Safinia see her emotional. “Why would I go, anyway? Everyone I love is already here. There’s no way they’re getting out tonight.”

“But—”

She turned fierce. “The men will need someone on this side of the gates, anyway, when this turns to war. Get them out so we have a chance of fighting back.”

Tarpeia embraced her roughly—Safinia was too startled to respond, the surprising strength of Tarpeia’s hands pushing into her back, the hardness of their shoulders banging together. “I’m not drinking Hersilia’s poison. I promise you that. Mettius was going to get a drink when the show started—go find him.”

She gave one last squeeze, then released Safinia with a shove, pushing her in the direction of the market at the end of the forum. Safinia resisted the urge to turn and look at her a last time—better to think of her later as proud and frustrating and furious. Not frightened, holding her arms around herself in a shadow. We’ll see each other again, Safinia told herself, but she wasn’t sure it was true.