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More than Safinia expected were women. Nearly all were Safinia’s students, tough girls from the outskirts. But a few were from the city—might have been friends with Tarpeia, holding weapons only because a richer woman suggested it. Alive, because of Safinia.

She lowered Attice to the ground, gently cradling her head. Anesia helped, eyes red-rimmed with furious tears.

“Is she . . .”

“Still alive,” Safinia murmured. But Attice had never been this still a sleeper. She was always curled, clutching at whatever was nearby, twitching—sometimes so hard she woke herself up, breathless. But for the fluttering of her eyelashes, the slight shift of her chin as she tracked both Safinia and Anesia, she was barely holding on, but Safinia didn’t allow herself to think it. “She needs water. And clean rags, to redress the wound.”

It was the worst night of Safinia’s life. Far worse than starving in Hersilia’s cell, far worse than all the violence itself. Attice was not the only survivor on the brink; around them were the moans of the dying and the sobs of their loved ones. Anesia cleaned Mettius’s sash as best she could and they rebound Attice’s wound, the blood still stubbornly leaking. The knife had caught an organ, an artery, perhaps—Safinia wasn’t sure of the body’s landscape beyond what might strike a killing blow.

Eventually Anesia fell asleep, curled nearby in Aulus’s arms. He and Mettius stayed close, wordlessly answering Safinia’s commands—hold this down, help me lift her, get some more water. She sat with Attice’s head and shoulders against her chest, her sister’s hand in hers so she could feel it squeezing still, reassure herself of the pulse weakly tapping through Attice’s fingertips.

The dying took a long time. Long enough for Safinia to force herself to confront it. No one survived a chest wound like this.

Late into the night, after Mettius had fallen asleep, too, Attice turned her head. “Ama,” she rasped.

“Don’t. Save your strength.”

The barest pressure from the hand in Safinia’s hand. “Scared—to miss you.”

“You won’t,” Safinia whispered. “I’ll come with you. I won’t—I don’t want to do this without you.”

“Anesia,” Attice answered. “Ores. The rest. Need you.”

“They don’t.” A sob was trapped somewhere in Safinia’s throat. “I can’t do it.”

Why was it always like this? Safinia wondered how many of her mother’s men had died with her hand in theirs. She always said the responsibility had been bolstering. Maybe it had been easier for her to whisper reassurance to those on the way to that shaded, lost place for the dead, make promises for the widows and children, knowing that she had a hundred other men relying on her. It wasn’t so for Safinia. She wanted to collapse.

“You can,” Attice said. “You will.”

She was gone in the hour before dawn. Anesia had woken by then. They both held a hand as her soul slipped from their fingers.

Activity spread among the survivors, as if sensing the threat the rising sun could bring them. As the sky turned grayish, those who hadn’t died in the night were loaded onto makeshift stretchers. Those who had would be carried by their families until they found a place safe to burn them.

Safinia agonized. She couldn’t leave Attice to Mettius, no matter how much a brother he was to them. But she couldn’t go with the rest. Not with Orestilla trapped.

It was Anesia who stopped her as she gathered her spear and pulled her hair back. “You’ll die if you leave,” she told Safinia flatly. “Aulus is right. We’ll get her back when we make war.”

“I can’t just leave her,” Safinia murmured.

“We all have someone there,” a man said. Safinia thought she recognized his voice but couldn’t place him among her neighbors.

She squinted and realized with a jolt that it was Faustus, from Crustumerium. There were a few others, she found in looking around, that didn’t dress like Quirites. Probably from Antemnae and Toffia as well as Crustumerium and Cures.

“Going back now is death,” Faustus said. “Or else we all would.”

For a moment Safinia wanted to scream at them. How dare they ask her to take another loss? How could they treat Orestilla’s life with such dismissal? But a hand came to rest on her shoulder. Mettius. Its weight made her pause long enough to look. Anesia’s face was streaked with tears and shock. Faustus’s hands were mottled with the deep, angry imprints of his own fingernails. No one was leaving because they wanted to.

Safinia breathed out. It felt like carving a cavity into her chest. This time Anesia helped slide Attice’s lifeless form onto her back. Then they walked.

They arrived in the outskirts of Antemnae—now the closest Sabine town to Rome, after Caenina had fallen—as the sky lightened. Antemnae’s people were in slightly better shape than Cures’s: Their governor had protested friendship with Rome and kept his household and his guards back from the Consualia. He’d been raided too many times to lose his sense of self-preservation now, he said to the survivors, and invited them to camp near the guardhouse for a night while they tended wounds and burned their dead.

“Generous of him,” Mettius muttered. There had been no word yet on whether King Tatius lived. Every head of state in Sabinum probably eyed his throne.

They boiled linen for bandages and cut crutches from saplings. Two of their number were alive but only just. They would need stretchers to make it to Cures. One of them was Quintus. He was white with blood loss.

“He’ll be alright,” Safinia said as Faustus touched Quintus’s cheek, nothing more to be done for his care, but clearly unwilling to step away. Quintus’s breath was shallow but unmistakably present. “He can’t die before he experiences the den of sin that is Cures.”

Faustus half-smiled at that. She knew how he felt; the survivors chatted and joked with each other as a matter of habit, but they were like ghosts, vacantly repeating patterns.