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Mettius sat down with them—Faustus, Safinia, and Attice, who Safinia refused to part with as long as her body was still intact—and watched some of the men work on a burial pyre. After a while, Aulus came by to wipe his forehead of sweat and rest. “There are only forty of us,” he said. “What chance do we stand?”

“We have more girls than we thought,” Mettius said. “The Romans didn’t know what hit them. Safinia saw to that.”

“Plenty didn’t attend,” Faustus said. “And the girls that were taken will make every Roman miserable.”

“Tarpeia has plans for it,” Safinia said, admiration buoying her for a moment. “The man who took her won’t know another day of peace in his life.”

“Maybe we can get word to her, get the gates open and catch the Romans unaware,” Mettius murmured. “Her or Ores.”

Orestilla. Safinia closed her eyes and blocked out the rest of the conversation. Mettius hadn’t been far from her side since they had escaped Rome. She knew he was trying to make up for letting her down years ago, but she wished she had the words to tell him how much she would rather he be dead than Attice, or that she could trade him for Orestilla. She was horrified by herself for thinking it.

Her eyes opened when Anesia came over and touched her knee. “It’s time.” The pyre reeked with oil.

They could do nothing for the stain down Attice’s stola, but her hands and face were clean and at rest. There were other bodies laid next to her; someone’s child, and a man from Crustumerium’s wife, plus two Sabine who’d died from injuries as they attempted to escape. One of them, Safinia dimly remembered, had been her mother’s friend, though she never came to check in on the girls once Calliste was dead.

Not all the survivors came to watch. Those with beloved dead were given privacy at one end of the pyre, standing apart from each other. Mettius wept silently beside Safinia; on her other side, Anesia held her hand so tightly she half-expected blood to seep from the indents of her fingernails.

Someone handed them torches. Safinia and Anesia stepped forward as one, looking to the others, before lighting the pyre at Attice’s feet. It blazed to life, and the mourners left their torches to burn with the fire.

Flame flickered over Attice’s face and hid her from Safinia’s view. It was almost a relief when Safinia realized she could no longer see her—she was released from staring and wondering how her death could be real.

For a moment, their little trio was quiet. Then, Anesia: “Who will do the words?”

At their parents’ cremation, it had been Numa. But there were no pious men in the survivors. Safinia took a steadying breath and stepped forward. She forced herself to look at the silhouetted bodies of the four other dead. A breeze swung the fire to the west, and briefly she could see their cold faces. Each tranquil, released from their suffering. They would take what happened with them to that place that tugged their souls below; maybe, dug into the ground, the truth would grow from where their spirits rested.

The truth had to be a force stronger than Livy. Safinia needed to believe it.

She thought for a long moment, remembering the invocations her father had spoken on festival days. First Janus, to open the door for all other divine witnesses. She named as many as she could think of: Flora and Minerva and Diana; Sancus and Sabus; Luna and Sol; the family Lares. She didn’t hate the gods for turning their backs on their children. A part of her believed what Livy said, that it was the other way around, and gods were the children of men. She mourned either way, that they had lost the collective will that made deities out of things like spring, oaths, and fire.

When she got to Feronia, she paused to feel the wild green center under her feet.

“We give our kin to the wild,” Safinia said. “So the wild may someday give them back.”

She closed her eyes and held still, feeling the heartbeat of the earth pound. She saw—in the same fashion of her vision as Livy died—the green grow and recede, wave-like, through time. As inevitable as the tides. People sprang up around her, and then they left, and then new people came back, and left again. Between them, the wild, returning and returning. Someone, sometime, would unearth her and her sisters and the world would know them again.

Safinia opened her eyes. The last god now—Vesta, the goddess of fire. Anesia took her hand as the words died in the air. It should have felt small to Safinia—just one young woman in all of human history, as unimportant as a leaf—but she felt the light pulse of Anesia’s heart in her wrist and knew better.

A small figure stood aside the pyre, her face washed with heat. Safinia looked at her and clenched her jaw: Rania, who had no body to mourn, but was half of herself anyway. No one had found Flavia.

I’ll make them pay, Safinia thought. Someday, I will.

X

Those who had remained in Cures, and the survivors who had gone on ahead, waited for them at the north gate. Helped by those who’d stayed in the outskirts, they prepared food and medicine for the survivors as they arrived. Tents for the newly displaced exploded across the open field that licked the city gates, and even those Quirites with a home to go to lingered.

There was a sense of the fireside tale in the way the survivors told what happened. They’d been traveling together the last several days but had only relayed the bare bones of the Consualia to each other. Now, it poured out of them. Those who weren’t from Cures were welcomed, too. Like the Quirites, all of them had lost someone—friends, lovers, sisters—in the crowd. No one spoke of them leaving.

“Our girls are still alive,” a man said. “That’s a comfort, at least.”

The group was quiet. They knew what the women they’d left behind were enduring. And no single one of them was too important not to be killed if she proved troublesome, or if the Romans thought it would discourage a counterattack.

They talked until the details washed over Safinia. She caught Anesia’s eye; her sister looked exhausted.

“What next?” a magistrate asked. “No one has seen King Tatius since the Consualia.”

“Did he go?” Murmurs broke out, but did not coalesce into a consensus. “What about Lord Pompilius? He’ll know what to do.”

“Defected,” Safinia said. Several disbelieving heads turned toward her. A man opened his mouth to protest—by the silk he wore, one of Numa’s flunkies—but thought better of it when Mettius leveled a warning glare. “And his daughter.”