Brica truly did look exhausted. She was in her forties now, and this child, her third by her second husband, had proven especially trying. Besides, that new husband was not so supportive as dull but good-hearted Castor—who had eventually fallen in love with a woman from beyond the Order, and now lived in contentment with a young second family in a jostling suburb, safe from the subterranean strangeness of the Crypt. But still, Agrippina had proven a strong support as she had grown, as had Brica’s second daughter, eleven years old, named Julia for her long-dead great-grandmother.

It was Agrippina, as it happened, that Brica wanted to talk about.

“Her bleeding has begun,” Brica said softly, and Agrippina’s face purpled. “It is time for her celebration—the first of my children to become a woman.” Brica hugged her daughter. “Already the boys watch her—I’ve seen their eyes—and soon she will be having babies of her own.”

“Oh, Mother,” muttered the wretched Agrippina.

“I’ll be a grandmother,” said Brica. “And you, Mother, a great-grandmother. With Agrippina fertile I won’t be having any more children of my own . . . I hope this will be the last before my change . . . As for the ceremony—”

“No,” said Regina sharply.

Agrippina looked at her in shock.

Brica said, “But every girl since Venus—on my own wedding day, as you remember well, Mother—has been celebrated.” Anger flared briefly. “What are you saying—that my daughter, your own blood, isn’t good enough for such an honor?”

“No, of course not.” Regina thought fast, but inconclusively. It had been another impulsive decision, whose basis she didn’t yet understand herself. “I didn’t mean that. Of course you must plan the ceremony,” she said, seeking time to think.

But she and Brica were of course long-established combatants, and Brica had caught that note of sharpness. She glared at her mother, but her face was a hollow-eyed mask of fatigue, and she clearly did not want to argue.

Brica took her daughter’s arm. “Fine. Come, Agrippina.” And they left the peristylium without looking back.

Since that dreadful day when the Vandals had ravaged Rome, things had changed greatly for the Order.

As the Order’s wealth had increased, a great deal had been invested in the estate on the Appian Way, which today served primarily as a school. But even more money had been sunk underground.

The use of the Catacombs had proven so obviously valuable that nobody had objected when Regina had suggested extending and modifying them. The old cemetery directly beneath the house remained, almost unmodified; for a Christian order it would have been disrespectful to have disturbed such a shrine. But the tunnels had been greatly extended, and new rooms and passageways had been dug into the soft rock.