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Safinia gave up any hope of sleep the night before their departure. She and Rania and the others would leave just a little ahead of the war contingent, so that there wasn’t enough time to try to find them. It was all planned out; the same bag she’d carried with Livy was now in a heap outside the threshold of her home.

She walked the entirety of Cures, past the narrow courtyard Rania had used to teach her friends and the one Tarpeia had offered up, and the circus, that rare time they’d been able to do their training in public. The city was nearly empty. Safinia stopped for a moment at the mouth of Orestilla’s street, imagining the locked shutters of her workshops sliding open, a warm glow inside. The city was still too cramped, too smelly, but at least it wasn’t anything like the one she’d seen as Livy died. She mourned that Cures Sabini was not good enough to keep them.

The rest of the night Safinia spent sitting on Mettius’s low wall, where she could see the light of her own hearth reach, tide-like, from under the curtain—and where she would not miss Anesia, if she were to come down the path with her bags.

XIII

By the time the sun was fully up, Anesia still hadn’t come. Mettius had kissed Safinia goodbye already. Waiting by the house shrine were Rania, her friends, and a few others. A woman leaving her husband. Another who’d fought alongside Calliste. Quintus and Faustus. Safinia looked anxiously between them.

“We can wait a little while,” Quintus said. The others nodded. They appeared excited. The morning air still held a chill—Rania’s cheeks were bright.

Safinia turned her eyes back to the ridge. Finally, finally, two figures. Anesia and Aulus.

They didn’t have bags with them. Safinia saw it in Anesia’s eyes, the hesitant apology, when she came close and opened her arms for an embrace. Safinia seized her, folded her arms around her living sister’s back and tried to clutch it tightly enough that the indentation would remain on her skin forever.

“Aulus and I are leaving after lunch, with the rest.” Anesia hiccupped into her shoulder. “But we still need to bury Attice’s ashes.”

Safinia looked at her group. They were sitting, snacking, or chasing each other, depending on their age. Quintus was right—they could wait just a little while longer.

For a moment it was like any other morning—Safinia went to fetch the little clay pot that held Attice’s ashes as if this was a normal chore. As she grabbed the pot, a lumpy cloth package caught her eye, stuffed behind some vinegar. Safinia unwrapped it.

They were Orestilla’s dowry bracelets. Safinia touched her finger to them, remembering the way they’d glittered up Orestilla’s arm as she unwound them. She folded the cloth back around the bracelets and stuck them in her belt.

Outside, Anesia poked through her packed satchel. “You’re an animal,” she said. “At least take the oils Ores left.”

Safinia nudged Anesia with her foot. “I’m trying to be practical,” she said. “Speaking of, this is your last chance for Aulus to approach me for your hand.”

Anesia blew an errant hair out of her face as she overloaded Safinia’s bags with things she didn’t need, but would surely someday be glad to have. “I told him we’ll do it later. I have to, if I want daughters. I can’t say I like the idea of how you make them, though.”

“It can be fun.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Anesia shrugged. “Maybe I’ll marry Mettius instead. Our children will have good standing if I do. They could be councilors or magistrates.”

Safinia shook her head. Personally, she hated both ideas, but at least Anesia would have people looking out for her. “Well, either way,” she said. “I have something for you, when the time comes.”

She thrust Orestilla’s bangles at Anesia, watching her sister’s face change from skeptical to stricken. “Ama,” she whispered. “I could never. Those are yours.”

“You know I’ll never marry. She’d want you to have them.”

Anesia shook her head. “She’d want you to have them more. I mean, she’d give them to me, she would—but she’d wish she could put them on your arm.” She swallowed once, twice, and then her composure was back. “And besides, Aulus will have me with Mama’s horrible old bracelets if it means I actually tell him yes.”

Safinia looked at her hands. In one, Orestilla’s dowry. In the other, Attice’s ashes. Anesia smiled at her. “I’ll help get them on you.”

For a moment it seemed like they would go on chatting, talking about little things. But when Safinia pushed the bracelets up her arm like a light, jingling sleeve, they could not ignore the little pot in her hands.

“I’ll get the candles.”

Safinia nodded. The clay in her hands was warmed by the hearth it had been sitting aside. There could be a little heart beating at its center. In Sabinum, the cremation was when the spirit separated from the remains, but for some reason it had been hard to bury the ashes and have it done with. Anesia had avoided it all winter. Now they had no choice.

They decided it would go at the base of the olive tree. They scraped at the ground between two thick roots until it gave way, using a kitchen knife to hack the dirt apart, then scooping it with their hands. As they worked they jostled each other, which would have become a shoving match had Anesia not begun to laugh, laughing harder at Safinia’s annoyance. The sunlight burned away an overcast layer, revealing an unruffled blue sky. When Safinia could put her arm in the hole up to her elbow, they took the jar and set it gently inside.

Neither were ready to fill the hole in. They looked at it together, both feeling the tug of an urgent journey awaiting them. “Do you remember Erulus? The story of Feronia’s son?” Anesia asked. “I feel like a third of me has died.”

“I feel that too,” Safinia whispered. She was glad she had waited until Anesia was ready to do this. So much of their grieving had been in isolation. “I keep thinking how unfair it is that her last years were so hard.”

“Ama, she was happy,” Anesia said. “I know she was. I’m not saying she was only ever happy, but who is?”

Safinia wished Attice were here now to teach them how to live happily after a cataclysm. Maybe Anesia was right, and Attice had managed it, so slowly Safinia wasn’t even sure it was happening, like a wound that only heals when you look away. She thought of Attice’s quick hands and rasping laughter, the way she wore her hair up around Orestilla, the scar uncovered down her neck and shoulder. “I hope you’re right,” she said.