Everything started to go wrong for Regina on the night the strange light flared in the sky. Looking back, she would often wonder at how the great events of the silent sky were so linked to the business of the Earth, the blood and the dirt of life. Her grandfather would have understood the meaning of such an omen, she thought. But she was too young to comprehend.

And the evening had started so well, so brightly.

Regina was just seven years old.

When she heard that her mother was getting dressed for her birthday party, Regina abandoned her dolls and ran whooping through the villa. She scampered all the way around three sides of the courtyard, from the little temple with the lararium—where her father, looking exasperated, was making his daily tribute of wine and food to the three matres, the family gods—and through the main building with the old burned-out bathhouse she was forbidden ever to enter, and then to her mother’s bedroom.

When she got there Julia was already sitting on her couch, holding a silver mirror before her face. Julia brushed a lock of pale hair from her forehead and murmured irritably at Cartumandua, who stepped back from her mistress, combs and pins in her hands. The slave was fifteen years old, thin as a reed, with black hair, deep brown eyes, and broad, dark features. Today, though, her face was a sickly white and slick with sweat. There were two other slave women here, standing by with colored bottles of perfume and oils, but Regina didn’t know their names and ignored them.

Regina ran forward. “Mother! Mother! Let me fix your hair!”

Cartumandua held back the comb, murmuring in her thick country accent, “No, child. You’ll spoil it. And there is no time—”

It was just as she had spoken to Regina when she was a little girl, when Cartumandua had been given to her as her companion and guardian. But Regina didn’t have to take orders like that from a slave. “No!” she snapped. “Give me the comb, Cartumandua. Give it to me!”

“Sh, sh.” Julia turned and took her daughter’s small hands in her delicate, manicured fingers. She was wearing a simple white tunic, soon to be replaced by the evening’s elaborate garments. “What a noise you’re making! Do you want to frighten all our guests away?”

Regina gazed into her mother’s gray eyes, so much like her own—the family eyes, eyes filled with smoke, as her grandfather always said. “No. But I want to do it! And Cartumandua says—”