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“I try not to think about her,” Anesia murmured. Eastern light caught the flyaways in her hair, and Safinia resisted the urge to smooth them down.

“Is that what you’ll do to Attice? Or me, when my time comes? Think of us so rarely that you forget?” Safinia had spent countless nights staring at the ceiling, trying to remember the particulars of their mother’s voice and face, down to her eyebrows, the lines around her lips. But when she saw the hurt in Anesia’s face, she regretted her words. “We should bury the ashes.”

“I’m not ready yet,” Anesia said, her voice raw. She didn’t look at Safinia, only watched the sun until it crept up the mountain and lit her dark eyes.

Safinia didn’t sleep until midday, when she’d begun to sway on her feet. The hut was stuffy, so she curled up in the grass, beneath the canvas strung from their olive tree. The first sleep was dreamless—exhaustion carried her in a river beyond her grief. But all the rest tormented her.

She dreamed of every Roman she’d killed, who, together with the two men who’d taken Attice, had their revenge. They tortured Safinia brutally, flaying her skin or cutting her innards. Sometimes she stood before Romulus, and instead of stopping just short, he ran her through. She began to sleep in short bursts through the day; at night, Safinia hunted, safe and formless behind the tree line.

The more troubling dreams came when the violent ones subsided. Orestilla and Attice began to visit her. Neither were a comfort. They would sit, still and silent, eyes deadened, while Safinia tried to embrace them, her arms closing on air. Orestilla, sometimes, would reach a hand out, but that was all. Safinia had to remind herself, every time she woke up, that Orestilla was still alive. Agonizingly, horribly alive, enduring Hostius. But maybe alive to someday reunite.

The winter was mild, its rains never turning to sleet. Mettius and Faustus helped Safinia patch her roof and ensured that she was eating, before heading into the city to meet Anesia and argue with the haphazard war councils that had sprung up. Safinia might have felt lonely, but she had Quintus at her side during the day. He had lived, albeit without the use of one arm, and he and Faustus moved into Safinia’s hut rather than returning to their families in Crustumerium. At least temporarily. The warriors would head there in the spring. It was a better landing stage for war than hilly, steep Cures.

For the first month after Attice’s death, Anesia and Safinia slept fitfully next to each other. Several times, they woke through the night, reaching for Attice, who should have been between them. Safinia wondered if this slow agony would ever end. How many times would Attice have to die in Safinia’s routines as they built around her absence? Finally Anesia decided in a fit of exasperation that she would move to Orestilla’s insula.

At first, Safinia decided to be hurt. It was the first emotion she’d had in a while, besides the deadened sadness that had consumed her since the Consualia, and she clung to it viciously. She followed Anesia into the city that morning, carrying half their food stores in a pack slung over her shoulder, both arguing at the top of their lungs.

“I’m not abandoning you!” Anesia yelled. “I already have to work twice as hard for those stupid councils to listen to me—it’s easier if they think I have a little status, and if they can’t try to convene without me there.”

“As if Mettius couldn’t speak for you.” Safinia threw the bag down in the courtyard.

“Poor Metty is terrified,” Anesia retorted. “He has enough on his mind without yelling at old men to shut up and listen to me all day.”

Safinia stalked away without bothering to help Anesia get her things up the stairs. In truth, it made her breath feel short to be in that courtyard, or to look up at the windows she’d leaned out of, feeling cooped up with the twins and her sisters and Orestilla. How could she have yearned, then, to be alone? All that wasted time.

The next morning, she walked with Mettius and Faustus to the council, gathered in makeshift fashion in the forum. There were not enough elite left in Cures to keep the plebeians out of the major decisions. Onlookers perched on crates or restaurant counters—the council members themselves sat on much the same.

Anesia was already there, a tablet in her hand as if she would be taking notes. Safinia shot her a look and her sister tipped it slightly to her—doodles. Safinia had to smother her laughter. It was brilliant, actually, for Anesia to pretend she was literate.

On this day they discussed the possibility of a ver sacrum. Safinia had known they would eventually. It had been several generations since the most recent one—only one or two of the oldest Quirites could remember it happening. They all knew the legend of the very first, though: Sabus, walking into the wilderness with his Sabine, following an aspect of Feronia to the ridge Cures would be built on. There, he sacrificed the roe deer she’d sent to lead him and buried its bones on the high ground that would later become their Regia.

When Safinia was a child, listening to this story, she wished it were her. Leaving. The feeling bloomed in her again now—asking her mother endlessly for stories of other places, staring longingly at the horizon—all that she pushed down deep inside herself when she became patriarch for her line.

“I would follow a bird,” she’d told Calliste once. “If I had been chosen to go.”

“No one is going to sacrifice you,” her mother had answered, wrongly guessing Safinia’s anxiety. “It only happens after a disaster, only for the children born in a hard spring. When you were born, the ground was green and your father and I were growing fat on all the salt we had stored.”

In the forum, the prospect of a ver sacrum made onlookers mutter. It was a hard thing, to be asked to wait twenty years for justice. “Are we supposed to pretend our girls are food we cannot now eat?” a man asked. “A famine that we can make up for with gifts to the gods?”

Safinia frowned. Was that the point? The children sacrificed in a ver sacrum were appeasements? It couldn’t be right. Every city was founded with a ver sacrum. They weren’t meant to die, they were meant to build—but Safinia had never considered a why beyond tradition itself.

“With what children, anyway?” another man put in. “We find ourselves in the same position as the Romans. Cures faces a dire shortage of mothers.”

“Maybe they’ll do one in Rome,” a former councilor of King Tatius suggested. They’d learned in time that the king himself was being held hostage in Rome, but it seemed to make little difference.

“As if Romulus will let fighting men leave.”

They bickered until the smells of cooking drifted into the forum from the nearby corner chefs and became too tantalizing to ignore. Safinia went to kiss Anesia on the head and admire her page full of doodles. “What’s this in the corner?”

“That’s you sulking.”

Safinia laughed. It looked nothing like her, but now that Anesia said so, she could see rapid circles approximated tangled, curly hair. “Well?” she asked Anesia. “Shall we get started on the rituals? A ver sacrum doesn’t seem so bad to me.”

“We don’t need it,” Anesia said, hopping off her barrel. “They keep trying to make contingency plans. It’s because everyone is afraid that we’ll lose. They don’t seem to realize that it doesn’t matter one way or the other.”

“Of course it matters,” Safinia bristled.

“I know, I know—but what are we doing, making all these alternate plans? Trying to imagine some place safe enough to flee to? Some people only want to fight if they think that at the last second they can pull their spears up and go somewhere else. They’ve even floated the idea of treaties with Numa.” Anesia kicked a small rock as they walked—they passed the street where Orestilla’s apartment was without turning. “All we need to do is decide that our girls are worth dying for. If that’s what it takes.”