Lucia smiled, but it was forced. She longed only to put the clock back a few weeks, back to the time before the bleeding had afflicted her—or better still back two or three or four years to when she had just been another little girl, just one of the crowd, invisible.

As it turned out her secret didn’t last another twenty-four hours. She didn’t approach Rosa Poole of the cupola. Pina did it for her.

Chapter 18

Chapter 18

For days Artorius marched them along the old roads, far to the west. At night they slept in the open, perhaps sheltered by a hastily constructed lean-to, their only bedding the spare clothing they carried with them. Every day Regina woke to a rough breakfast of salted meat. She was always stiff and cold despite the mildness of the midsummer nights.

Eventually, though, Regina found herself recognizing the countryside. It was a land crowded with hills, green and rounded—a human-scale landscape, very unlike the wastes of the border country around the Wall.

Her geography remained sketchy, little better informed than by Aetius’s map drawn in the dirt. But this was, she realized slowly, home. Blown by the winds of fate, she had sailed in a great circle, and come back to where she had started. Still, she had no idea exactly where the site of the family villa was: she had left at age seven, after all, and there was nobody left alive, Carta or Aetius, who might know. Perhaps it was best not to know; she could not bear to see it a ruin.

And there were changes. Even here the country seemed far from friendly: on every hilltop, walls loomed and the smoke of fires curled into the air. It had become a land that bristled with defenses, like a hedgehog’s quills.

Artorius’s proposed new capital was a fort built on a brooding hill—what he called, in the old language, a “dunon.” Artorius had already assembled a community of a few hundred people, scraped together from across the country, and the place was alive with activity. Regina did not know what the hill might have been called in the days of the Romans; it seemed to have no Latin name. But some of the locals called it by the name of a nearby stream. It was the Caml hill, or the Caml fort.

On their first full day at the dunon Regina’s people were assigned to fetching stone from what was called a “quarry.” Artorius told Regina he would spare her this toil. She had made a good impression on him with her defiance, and she could stay here with him in his capital; perhaps he could find her a different role.

Brica encouraged her to accept. “He seems to like you, Mother, Jove knows why. You need to play on that for all it’s worth.”