Page 87

“By the gods, it will be a relief to leave this place,” he said after returning from one such lookout.

We tried to sit for a while in the inn’s common room, but the innkeeper watched us so intently that we retreated upstairs to our rooms, grateful for the locked door.

Pollux was not the only one who was nervous. If we couldn’t find the hidden enclave, Ismene would have nowhere to go. She could hardly return to the pleasure house when she was supposed to be at the Imperial Palace, and she couldn’t go back to Panpirion. What arrogance had made me think that a hidden refuge would be easy for us to find?

Ismene and I both slept fitfully. She tossed and turned beside me. When she finally fell asleep just before dawn, I dressed quietly and crept out of the room.

Pollux was already downstairs, packing a cloth-wrapped hunk of cheese into one of his bags by the light of a candle.

“I hope we’ve had enough rest, and can now resume our journey,” he said without looking up.

“Yes. I suppose we should leave today. I’m going to take a last walk around the square. I won’t be long.”

I went out into the cold morning. The sky had finally cleared, and as the sun began to rise, it cast a golden light on the humble buildings, giving them a strange beauty. Despite the early hour, many of the hard-working villagers were already up. A young man crossed the square, leading a cow by a heavy rope. The blacksmith stood in the doorway of his forge, digging for something in the pocket of his apron and exhaling puffs of condensation into the crisp air. To my delight, the two little girls we had seen the day before came around the corner of the bakery. One of them carried a wooden pail. They ran over to the stone well in the middle of the square, tied the bucket to a hook, and dropped it in.

The girls strained together to pull up the heavy water. How wonderful that for a few years, at least, they had the chance to go to school. It must be a rare opportunity; the schoolteacher would have to be very open-minded to teach girls as well as boys. What a stroke of fortune that such a person could be found in a little village like this one.

What kind of a person would teach little girls in a village schoolhouse?

I got slowly to my feet.

I crossed the small square in seconds, and I was so eager to see inside that I pushed open the schoolhouse’s wooden door without knocking. The single room held rows of stools, a small stack of wax tablets on the floor, and an abacus sitting on a rough wooden table. The smell of wax reminded me of the classroom at the Schola Morum. Memories flooded back: the click of the abacus on a day when the sunshine outside beckoned, the sting of a switch against my skin for a curtsy with poor posture, the sound of a roomful of girls reciting a love poem before a stern-faced teacher.

A woman with a broom in her hands bent over a small pile of dirt in the center of the room. She was slender and willowy, wearing a modest stola. Her face and hair were covered. Only her eyes showed, keen and gray, watching me as I took a step inside.

She straightened up, and we stared at each other for a few seconds.

“You’re teaching little girls here,” I said.

“Where’s the harm in that?” she asked in a low, throaty voice.

“There isn’t any, of course.” I closed the door. “In fact, I might have ideas in common with the kind of person willing to teach girls.”

“What ideas?”

“For example, I think girls are very capable of learning.”

She rested the broom against the edge of table and clasped her hands. “If that is true, then we must take care what lessons we teach them.”

Her hands were rough and callused from work, but something about her posture, her inscrutable gray eyes, made me certain I knew, if nothing else, where she had been born.

She seemed to have reached the same conclusion about me. “The little I can see of your face is enough to tell me where you come from,” she said.

I took a step closer. “And you? I think you are also from Corlivo.”

“Don’t say that word out loud again here.” She glanced quickly out the window. “What do you want?”

I knew it would be best to tell the truth. “I’m looking for my mother, a woman named Antonia.”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “Why?”

“Because I never knew her, and I want to know what became of her. I’ve wondered about her my whole life. She left behind nothing but a small figurine tucked into my swaddling clothes.”

The skin above her eyes knitted into a frown. “What sort of figurine?”

“An image of the Goddess.” I hesitated and then forged on. “My friend and I have the impression that this might be the right place to look for a missing woman. A woman like us. We’ve—we’ve been told that women can find safe harbor somewhere near here.”

“Sometimes people who are missing don’t want to be found.”