Page 9

The oldest gods had no faces, no children, no lovers or mortal avatars. They only had the hum in the air near a very old tree, or a feeling of awareness when walking over a patch of moss.

The shrine was for the forest goddess—they all were a certain distance beyond the tree line. Unlike the house shrine, there were no shelves or stone figures under its sloping roof—only a bowl encircled by roots, and a faint etching in the wood that Safinia could not read, but knew spelled Feronia. Safinia was not her only cultist in the outskirts—anyone who had regular business in the woods had the good sense to give her offerings—but her worshippers were fewer and fewer.

It made Safinia a little sad. Feronia was one of the oldest Sabine gods. It was she who led the first ver sacrum, the ancient practice Sabine used to found their cities, following the avatar of a god into the wild until they found land suitable to settle. Feronia had found Sabus and his Lacaedomaenians in her deep, wild forest, and, in the form of a roe deer, led them to the ridge to settle Cures Sabini.

Another ver sacrum was performed whenever the Sabine were splintered—by famine, disaster, sometimes war—but there hadn’t been a fresh one in a few generations.

The rabbit’s innards were warm; Safinia reached her hand in and felt for the small, hard little heart, snapping its tendons with a tight yank. She set this, the intestines, and the rabbit’s liver in a heap at the altar’s base, asking Janus, the god of thresholds, to open the door to Feronia’s attention and murmuring prayers over the innards for the safety of Orestilla’s missing friends—and Hersilia. Then, the rabbit’s blood. Safinia lengthened her cut and tipped the carcass so that it would run over her hand and into the bowl, wrinkling her nose at its sharp, coppery scent.

Gods like Feronia wanted replacement, not appeasement. Accept this blood in place of Orestilla’s. Be sated, and do not hunger for lost girls.

She thought about continuing, about offering the second rabbit for a little extra assurance. But her stomach growled, thinking about fresh, raw rabbit leg. How much did Feronia need, anyway?

Safinia ate as she hiked to one of her preferred spots. Blood stained her cheek, but the meat was good—a luxury, really, since raw meat never kept for longer than an hour or two. It was funny how things could change in a day. She hadn’t left to hunt on a full stomach in a year, maybe. Today she felt strong, and the forest flowered around her in reply.

She continued north, higher into the mountains, where there was a cluster of tall trees she liked to climb as the day woke up. She always went as high as she could, until the branches were so thin that they bent dangerously under her weight. She liked to imagine that if she got high enough, lifted over the sprawling forest, she would be able to see a strip of the sea.

It was too far away—but where the tree line was peeled back and tamed, she could see her hut, dwarfed by the one Mettius lived in, up the ridge, and the small homes of her other neighbors. Cures’s wall looked closer from Safinia’s vantage than it was in real life—behind it, steam from bathhouses rose, making a haze across the bright terra-cotta roofs. Sea birds swooped above it all, looking for scraps left behind by careless Sabine with too much food to worry about crumbs.

The sun had escaped its early-morning tethers and now shone brightly into Safinia’s eyes. She blinked tears away and tried to empty her head of all thoughts aside from animal instinct. But Hersilia refused to leave her thoughts.

A leaf crunched nearby. Safinia reacted too quickly, startled, nearly falling out of her tree in her haste to get her weapon—by then the deer had already spotted her and was bounding away. Safinia threw anyway, the point of her spear breaking the hard, leftover winter rind off the dirt and sticking from the ground at an angle.

The problem, Safinia realized as she jumped down to retrieve her spear, was that now that she knew Hersilia was missing—what was she supposed to do? Just continue on with her life? Hersilia was important to more than just Safinia. Her disappearance could mean trouble on a scale beyond the kidnapping of a few merchants’ daughters. Her father was a councilor. He was King Tatius’s closest advisor, and he kept Cures running—oversaw the higher courts, intercalated the yearly calendar every January, and that was to say nothing of his census and the grain allotments that kept Safinia’s family through the winter. Most of Safinia’s neighbors respected him more than they did the king. If ever there was a daughter who should feel safe from kidnapping, it was Hersilia.

A twinge of guilt lodged in Safinia’s gut for thinking in these terms. As if a woman was only worthy if she was important to the world.

What if she went to the city and asked around herself? Mettius was friendly with many of the people Safinia had once liked. And she was head of her family officially, a legal patriarch—maybe she would be respected in the way Orestilla was not, if she reported Hersilia’s absence to the quaestors, who were meant to handle this sort of thing. The mystery was why Numa was not acting, why a father was not seeking his own daughter. Maybe he was keeping things quiet in case it turned out Hersilia was just having one of the reckless affairs she was prone to?

Or—Safinia’s spine chilled—she was being ransomed, and he didn’t want her hurt.

Cures, and the Sabine, had enemies. They were friendly enough with most of the Etruscan cities, but the Latins to the south were a problem. Other small kingdoms occasionally made trouble on their borders, too, though they were short-lived. Lately one of them, Rome, had been a nuisance. They were no real threat to Sabinum on size alone, but by all reports Rome was home to ruthless and savage fighters.

Safinia tossed her spear into the air, catching it with her opposite hand, rhythmically, as she thought. If she reached the same dead ends as Orestilla, she had options the girl did not. She wasn’t subject to the same stringent social rules Quirites followed, and she was strong—she could bully or intimidate answers out of people who would sneer at most women.

With Mettius’s help, she could even back up a few of those threats.

Safinia caught her spear as it came down. This time she held still. She’d already made a decision to involve herself in whatever happened to Hersilia. Orestilla’s presence at home cemented that. What would be the point of a half-measure?

Something in her body felt alive and buzzing. She would extricate herself if things got dangerous, she decided, though still giving herself permission to visit the city later. There would be no harm in asking around. A way of paying Orestilla back for some of the bounty she’d brought last night.

A gust of wind stirred the forest, as if to tug on Safinia’s arms and remind her she had work to do. A roe deer, a doe with poorly developed survival instincts, stepped delicately through the trees nearby. Safinia herself smelled enough of the forest that the doe hadn’t noticed her yet. She pulled her arm back, like opening her body for a yawn, and let the spear spin from her hand.

The spearpoint caught the deer in the temple; it collapsed, its spindling knees folding almost gracefully into the dirt. Safinia grinned. A good omen—she was almost never that squarely on the mark.

A few hours later, Safinia had a good haul. She’d strung the doe up to drain and to keep it away from predators and claimed two more rabbits. They hung limply over her shoulder, blood dripping over the skin of her back and pooling in the curve of her hip.

She whistled at the tree line; Anesia came soon after to help her with the deer. After extracting a promise for her little sister to show Orestilla how to skin a rabbit hide, Safinia left the girls to dress the meat and headed up the ridge.

A low wall encircled Mettius’s family homestead—two huts and a lean-to where his father worked, a vegetable garden, and a cluster of olive trees. Safinia and Attice had lived here when they were young, during raiding season, when both their mother and father were harrying Latins. The nostalgic comfort remained.

Mettius lifted a hand when he saw her; he was sprawled out on the wall, one leg splayed lazily with his toes touching the dirt, picking his teeth with a dull knife.

“Don’t you have any work to do?” she asked.

He waved his hand lazily in the direction of the lean-to. His father was there, whistling to himself as he dressed a large buck. “Aulus’s brothers brought that in this morning. I’m just waiting to take it into town.”

“You could be helping him.”