Read a preview
Chapter 1
The Ink That Would Not Dry
They say Saturn holds Rome’s fortune under lock and key, but ink loosens everything. It pools at the nib, wobbles like a pupil before it chooses which truth to fix. On the sixth day before the Kalends, when the Tiber smells of thunder and rotten figs, a wax tablet arrives at my desk in the Aerarium. The courier is a boy with the faded blue chalk of the Greens on his knuckles; chariot fandom has made him lean and sly.
“For the hand that copies the state,” he says, eyes darting toward the bronze doors. He means me.
I ease the tablet open. The stylus scratches spell out: auguria rupta. Auspices broken.
I know that phrase. It belongs to the Sibylline guardians and to nights of panic. It belongs to senators who need gods to agree with what they’ve already decided.
At the bottom I see a mark impressed into the wax: a laurel wreath around a falcon. Not the state seal. Not a family I know. The ink bleeds a little into the wood, almost purple rather than black.
“What do I do, Sabina?” whispers Simo, the junior clerk beside me. He is good with numbers and bad with courage.
“Seal this for me,” I say. “Then you’ll go to lunch and tell no one you were ever hungry.”
He nods, grateful for any instruction dressed as kindness. I tuck the tablet into my basket, beneath dull petitions about roof repairs and a guild’s request for three new benches in the Forum.
Above us, in the belly of the Temple of Saturn, the keys hang, and shadow keeps perfect tally of what we think is hidden. I think of my brother’s shadow, the way it stretched across the courtyard on the day the Prefect took him. Ink can’t reach that far, but memory does.
