Amara knows Fabia doesn’t mean to be hurtful, but still, her last mouthful of food feels like a stone as she swallows it. “That bread was dry, wasn’t it?” she says, changing the subject. She reaches down to pick up the jug by her feet. “Would you mind fetching us some more water, please? Also, I think the other cells will need some more for this evening.”

Fabia takes the jug. She looks at Amara, the hunger still in her eyes. “What does it feel like?”

“What does what feel like?”

“Being free. What does it feel like?”

What did it feel like to be Timarete? Amara’s past life blazes into her mind’s eye, with all its love, innocence and hope. “When you see a bird flying,” she says, “that moment when it chooses to swoop lower or soar higher, when there’s nothing but air stopping it, that’s what freedom feels like.” She pauses, knowing that this isn’t the whole truth. The memory she tries to keep buried, the agony of her last day as a free woman rises to the surface. “But hunger feels the same, Fabia. Whether you are slave or free, hunger is the same.”

Fabia nods, satisfied. Hunger is something she understands. She leaves the cell, and the sound of her footsteps is swallowed up almost instantly by the thickness of the stone. Amara stays sitting on the bed, conscious of the world washing past the walls outside, even though she cannot see it. Out there, over unimaginable distance, her hometown still exists. People she knew: her neighbors, her father’s patients, the baker who always spared her bread, Chremes, Niobe. All the figures of her past will still be living out their lives in Aphidnai. But not her mother. Amara knows that her mother is dead.

She knew it on her first day as a slave. After the trauma of saying goodbye, Chremes took her to his bedroom. But instead of stripping her naked as she had feared, he seized the small bundle of belongings she had brought with her. Amara watched, bewildered and afraid, as Chremes rifled through her father’s old leather bag until he found what he was looking for. Inside, her mother had hidden the money she had been paid for her only child. A well-known trick, Chremes said as he counted out the coins, for naive parents selling their children. A way to give them a head start toward buying back their own freedom.

Amara stands up. She doesn’t want to remember the rest of that day. Everything her parents had hoped for, every gift they gave her, including her mother’s last desperate act of love, has been taken from her. Timarete no longer exists, except as a brief reflection in the eyes of a boy from Athens. She will have to survive as Amara.