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The offerings were swept into the dirt and smashed underfoot. Safinia kicked at the stone until she was sure she’d broken something. She only stopped when Quintus, and then Faustus, came to drag her away and try to keep her from hurting anything else. The screaming turned to sobbing; she couldn’t hold herself up. Each cry came from deep in her stomach and took everything along with it—she weighed the grass down in vomit, until there was nothing in her body but acid.

“Is it the first time she’s cried?” she heard Faustus ask.

“I don’t know,” Quintus said. He was muffled in Safinia’s ears. She turned her fury and helplessness to her own body, opened deep, bleeding furrows in her arms as she dragged her nails in them. Quintus, urgently: “Get Anesia.”

It was every sleepless night since the Consualia. It was Attice’s still face, that she’d died after handing Rania to Mettius, to save her. She would have done that for any little girl in Sabinum. It was Orestilla, getting a knife free and not using it to save herself. It was the blood pouring out of Livy around Safinia’s hands; she still thought she could smell it under her fingernails. Safinia’s body seized, the grief clutched in her chest so hard she thought her heart might fail with it.

It was that war was pointless. Who cared if Cures won? They would sell each other’s children as easily as Hersilia had. Rome was not special. They were the same in cruelty. They would go to the same lengths. Animals, every man. Wherever they came from.

Dimly, she was aware of Anesia’s hands on hers, prying them away from her skin. Aware of soft whispering, soothing voices. But Safinia didn’t want to be soothed. And she wouldn’t go to war for these men.

“I can’t,” was all she could say for a long time.

“I know,” Anesia said, though she didn’t. “It’s okay.” Nothing helped. Killing was only ever worth it if something changed. Safinia couldn’t do it only for things to remain the same. There was enough blood on her hands.

In the days that followed, the wearing on of winter, Safinia cried often. The dam had broken and now a torrent rushed out. Each morning she went to teach her girls, and each time after she barely made it home before grief or fury overtook her. They alternated in her body. A funnel cloud of her stomach and heart.

Soon, most of Cures would pack and make a convoy all the way to Crustumerium to prepare for war. Mettius would lead them. Anesia was going, too. Of the revelation of Rania’s friends, she told Safinia, “I’m not fighting for Cures, I’m fighting for Orestilla.” Things were frosty between the sisters. She couldn’t blame Anesia, but she couldn’t fight for the city, either.

Rania’s oldest friend, Calpurnia, had her first bleeds. Luckily it was when the city was thrown into frenzy, preparing supplies, weapons, food for hundreds of fighters, and Safinia helped her hide it from her parents and domestici.

Safinia was meant to go to Crustumerium, too, as a hunter and supplier. She’d made arrangements with her girls to keep training them on the road, and in the city. When they were too old to hide from their husbands, they would just have to take their chances. Safinia would have to hope she’d taught them one or two useful things. She’d asked what would happen if the original wives were returned, and only Rania would tell her, later when they walked home from the lesson.

“They don’t want Roman-blooded babies,” she told Safinia. “They’ll have to be killed, and then—I think the marriages happen anyway.” There was agony in her voice, far too much for a ten-year-old to carry.

Safinia stared up at the thatched roofing at night, Quintus snoring lightly beside her and Faustus grumbling in his sleep. Orestilla would not have allowed this. She would not rest until she found somewhere safer.

XII

She found Timaeus soon after she woke up. He was more elusive in the winter months, but recently little sprouts had begun to shoulder open the cracks in the thawing ground, and Safinia knew he would be nearby. “Good health,” she said curtly, and he smiled at her.

“Good health,” he answered.

“I’m angry with you,” she said. It was irrational, but there it was. “You knew this was coming. You could have done more. You could have warned me properly.”

Timaeus was in his usual attire; his clothes were sturdy, well-patched, his boots laced to his knees and oiled to repel moisture. He settled his hands on his belt, cluttered with strange instruments, and looked at her. There was such endless pity in his eyes that she wanted to rage at him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “These things are . . . complicated.”

“What’s done is done,” Safinia said harshly. “You’ll make it up to me.”

“I will?” She could see his lips twitch at the ferocity of her glare. “It seems I have no other choice.”

They hiked to a familiar spot: a nice ledge to sit on, near one of Timaeus’s shrines. It had been ages since Safinia had bothered to sacrifice to Feronia, or any god, but she still felt divinity underfoot, drawing her to a center in the tangled, whorled fingers of Feronia’s trees. The woods were still a comfort, though these days any comfort twisted in Safinia’s guts—she didn’t deserve it, not yet.

Timaeus untied a cloth and offered Safinia an assortment of dried fruit. “What is it you need?”

She chewed, working her tongue between her teeth to dislodge the skin that stuck there. What did she need? A year ago, hungry, with Attice still plagued by her trauma, she would have said—and only with no one to overhear her, in the stillness between the boughs of a tree—that she needed to escape. Some way to get out from under the weight of those who wholly relied on her. She needed to not be the person standing between her sisters and the edge of a cliff.

Thank all the gods she hadn’t been granted that escape. She thought of Rania and her friends, the resolve in the way they held their jaws tight, and the hopefulness when they looked at Safinia, as if she were more than a woman. As if she would stand between them and the forces that could hurt them. It ached to take care of people when you had nothing real to give them. But that wasn’t true anymore. Orestilla had made it so.

She would expect Safinia to do well by these girls. Attice would, too. For once, Safinia felt like she stood atop the burden—like it was a foundation to hold her up, instead of a weight to tie her down.

“I need a guide,” Safinia said. “I want you to take me to Lucus Feroniae. To the sacred grove. I know it’s not far.”

“You want to leave,” he said, his dark eyes unreadable. “Are you sure the grove is where you want to go?”

“Where else?” she asked. She imagined Lucus Feroniae was walled with trees that stood trunk to trunk, growing harder to slip through with every passing year. It was deep in a forest that would take the Romans a hundred years to burn and cut through. “Where else is safe?”

“Nowhere,” Timaeus said. “Not one place. But there are many places where you could find peace for a while. The northeast, for one. Through the Apennines, to the coast—you would find that land verdant and unsettled.”