Artorius must have been desperate even to have considered such an approach, she thought; and that made her decision not to waste any of the Order’s funds even easier to make. “Here we celebrate life, not death,” she said. “Here each life is to be cherished, not spent like a token in some military adventure. That is our fundamental philosophy—it has always been my philosophy. I have said as much to Artorius, not that I imagine he listened.”

Ambrosius was a man of sense, who didn’t believe in wasting time. He didn’t try to change her mind. “I suspect Artorius already knows your answer,” he said wryly.

“Yes, I suspect he does. Wish him my blessing . . .”

She urged Ambrosius to stay for another day, for tomorrow there would be the coming-of-age ceremony, which she invited him to attend. “I would like you to leave with positive memories,” she said.

He agreed to stay.

He told her something of the fate of Durnovaria, the town closest to Artorius’s dunon. Its decline had never been reversed, and now it had been abandoned for perhaps forty years. “In places you can see where the buildings used to be, from courses of stone, rectangles and lines across the ground. But otherwise it is like a patch of young forest, where oak trees are spreading and foxes lurk, with only a few hummocks to show that once a whole town existed . . .”

It was only after their conversation was over that Regina remembered the ceremony she had invited him to would be the awkward affair of Agrippina, her granddaughter.

Fifteen years after the first of these ceremonies, for Venus daughter of Messalina, the coming-of-age celebrations had evolved their own rituals, as had so many of the practices of the Order. But this time, Regina felt instinctively, a new precedent must be set.

At first Regina let events follow the time-honored pattern. Agrippina’s sisters, aunts, cousins, and mother formed a circle around her on the stage of the Crypt’s tiny theater. They were in a pool of light cast by an array of lanterns and candles, and they were surrounded by as many of the Order as could squeeze in.

The only male, apart from some small boys with their mothers and sisters, was Ambrosius. Standing tall in his dark brown armor, amid women and girls in their costumes of white and purple, he was like a pillar of male strangeness, utterly out of place.

As the final preparations were made, Regina approached him, amused. “You don’t look terribly comfortable.”

“I can’t deny that,” he said, and he mopped his neck. “It is the low ceilings. The dense air. The smell.” He eyed her uneasily. “I don’t wish to give offense—perhaps you have become used to it. It is a smell of people—or of animals, perhaps—almost like the amphitheater, during the hunting shows.”