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Safinia ran.

He reached them. Hostius grabbed Orestilla and held her aloft on his hip, one foot driven into Mettius’s back as he tried to keep his rival down. Safinia’s lungs stabbed with pain. Had she broken a rib? When had that happened? A man tried to intercept her; she ducked under his sword and trusted Aulus to take care of him.

Safinia’s vision blurred. Her heels ate the earth. Anesia was only a step behind, swift with youth.

Hostius howled, a battlefield pitch to rival Romulus. The Romans who followed him raced his way, closer and faster than Safinia. Mettius rolled, finally, out from under Hostius’s grip, getting unsteadily to his feet and lunging. He was still drunk. Safinia could tell. He swung hard and missed, almost losing his balance.

One of the Romans coming their way stumbled and landed face down in the dirt, a pool of blood leaking from his throat. Orestilla had worked a hand—and a knife—free from Hostius’s grip and thrown it at him. Don’t throw! Safinia wanted to scream. Stab! But Hostius backed out of the fight, still holding her, one hand pulling the reins of his horse as it reared.

Safinia heard a choked sound over her shoulder. Anesia. Both of them ran without breath.

It would all be clear to Safinia, later. It would play in sequence in her thoughts over and over. But as she ran it seemed disconnected, a story stenciled on a bowl. Orestilla thrashing as she tried to get another knife loose, as Hostius mounted up. She was nothing to him, weighed even less than that. Mettius, crying out in pain as a hoof caught his shoulder. He held it, still upright but torn between chasing Hostius and staying with his sister.

And the primal scream that tore out of Anesia’s throat. Safinia was distantly aware that her little sister had stopped running. She spared a look back, to check that Aulus had her, then turned ahead again. The last of Hostius’s friends ducked under Mettius’s wild swing—he was too injured to help. He reached for Rania, and Attice shoved Mettius’s sister into her brother’s arms.

A horn call changed the Roman’s attention. No need for more women—now the operative was war. Hostius was already long gone. His friend brandished his weapon.

Attice took the blade in her rib cage. She was what stood between him and Rania. Safinia was still too far away. Her sister’s chest crumpled around the wound.

The Roman died before he could turn his attention to Mettius. Safinia didn’t see herself do it, only felt a hot spray of blood against her arm. And then Attice was slumping into her hold, still warm, her hands holding fistfuls of blood against her chest.

“She’s alive,” Safinia said. Attice nodded, her head dropped against Safinia’s shoulder. Or maybe it was a twitch. “Someone—someone get me cloth. A tunic. Aulus!”

Someone handed her stained, balled-up fabric. Then Mettius’s and Anesia’s hands were there, steadying Safinia while she wrapped the wound, using as much pressure as she dared to staunch the flow. “You’re fine,” Safinia repeated over and over. Attice’s body trembled; her breaths were shallow. “You’re alright.”

Safinia looked up at the others. Anesia was stricken, her face white with shock; Mettius looked nauseous. Aulus was the first to recover, so decisively that Safinia burned with sudden, irrational hatred.

“We need to get out of here,” he said crisply. “Romulus is going to call for a charge. He’s up there, mounted. The palisade is down—we need to put distance between us and Rome.”

“Not without Ores,” Anesia said. Her hands shook as they smoothed Attice’s hair. “Where is she?”

Safinia looked for her. More Sabine had joined them, here at the edge of Rome, but only a few women, all bearing marks of vicious battle. Mettius’s father was here; he gathered up Rania.

“Hostius took her,” Safinia said. It was as if her voice came from miles away.

She could feel hands on her back. Someone was urging her to stand, to move, but she couldn’t. Orestilla needs you, a small part of her urged. Your love needs you. But she could feel the weakness in her sister, far worse than the first time she’d carried Attice out of the woods. She couldn’t die here. Not in Rome.

“We have to go get Orestilla,” Anesia yelled. Her fingers slid from Attice’s shoulders—Aulus, picking her up, maybe sensing that she was tensed to run. “We can’t leave without her!”

“We’ll get her back when we make war,” Aulus said. “Hostius is a marked man, now.”

Safinia didn’t know the name of the Roman who’d stabbed Attice, she realized. He lay close by, his face in the dirt. She didn’t know whose line to curse.

“Ama,” Anesia pleaded from Aulus’s back. “He has Ores!”

Safinia could feel Attice’s hands, flexing open and closed around her skin. As if she were trying to reassure herself they still worked. In the distance, she could not pick Orestilla or Hostius out of the methodically retreating lines of Romans. Aulus was right. Romulus cut a sharp shadow at the mouth of his Regia, mounted on a king of a horse. They had their girls. They would sweep the city now, organized into a monstrous shadow, like a flock of starlings.

She looked at Anesia and opened her mouth. Then closed it. She knew as well as Safinia that they couldn’t get to Orestilla now. This knowledge landed in Safinia’s heart and waited for her there, for her to feel after Attice was safe.

A man reached to pick up Safinia as Aulus had Anesia, and she grabbed his fingers and bent them until his arm twisted around his back and he yelped.

Mettius came to her, not to try to pick her up, but to help slide Attice onto Safinia’s back. “I can do it if she’s too heavy,” he said softly. Safinia shook her head. Somehow she stood, hoisting Attice as if she were a sleeping child being carried to bed. The blood was hot against her back, but—maybe being pressed to her would help staunch its flow. Mettius left her side as the survivors made for the thick trees that lined the Tiber north of Rome—it would be harder for mounted Romans to follow them through it.

Safinia knew she should be ranging through the edges of their group, as Mettius was, guarding them from stray Romans. But she walked in the middle of the women, some her neighbors, some city Quirites. They snuck glances at her as they walked away from the fire and the echoing screams. No one asked about Attice in the murmuring conversations that passed through the group of twenty or thirty. Only Safinia knew that the heart pressed against her back was still beating.

IX

The survivors made it three or four miles up the Tiber, pacing the salt road through the thick brush, before they had to stop and tend to their wounds and hearts. All were on edge—the distance was nothing for a horse. But the Romans seemed content to stay where they were. Celebrating, probably, Safinia assumed, and the thought was so disgusting that she tried to shove it into the numb part of her alongside Orestilla. She looked around at the subdued group and counted. Thirty-eight. Mettius and some other men had scouted and brought back more terrified Sabine from along the Tiber or in the woods than they’d hoped—and she realized they all wrestled with that same thought.