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to her husband’s land to live instead of having her husband come to her. And she had suffered the bleakness of spirit Baldemar’s long absences brought—this land’s gentle summer was the raiding season, and annually he decamped in spring, not to return until the time of rattling leaves. Athelinda wanted this child to be the one creature in the Nine Worlds that was hers alone; she and the girl would be bound in common need, and by a love known only to a mother and daughter who sit at the same loom.
    “Athelinda, take heed—you fell off asleep, you missed the worst of it. This monster must be gotten rid of, named and fed or not. Athelinda, you spawned a murderer of kin!”
    “What foul madness do you speak?”
    “Your daughter will kill my son!”
    “I heard no such thing.”
    “Of course not. You slept through it!”
    “I do not believe you, wicked woman. What vile spirit possesses you?”
    “Give me that child. I’ll do to it what it deserves.”
    “Ramis is sometimes wrong. I did not hear it, and I don’t believe it.”
    “Athelinda! Mother-love has robbed you of your wits. We all must agree to it. The child was born, lived for a day, became sickly, and died. If Mudrin and Fredemund say anything to anyone, they die for it. Now hand the brat to me. It goes into the lake.”
    Athelinda struggled to sit up. She had a fine, supple strength not always visible, but when it came, it flashed to the fore quick as a cat-strike. She was an avenging sylph with eyes that burned hot as a midsummer fire.
    “You are monstrous. She has taken food. Harm her and you commit the very crime of which you accuse the child. Even if Ramis did say it, I don’t believe it, and you are moonstruck to listen. Name a time when this has happened among us. You cannot. And that is because it could not happen. All nature would rise against a child before it could lay a hand upon a parent. Leave this babe be or I will go in arms to the next Law-Assembly and tell the tale of your crime before all our kinsmen and you shall stand judgment for it.”
    “You would not speak against the mother of your husband!”
    “I would and I will, if the mother of my husband murders my child.”
    And so Athelinda prevailed that day, and the child lived. As the seasons turned and Auriane grew, she felt a sense of dread in Hertha’s presence that she could never understand, as though she knew somehow what had passed on that day between her mother and grandmother.
    The oracle Athelinda heard in a fog of childbed pain was soon distorted in her mind and half forgotten. What she remembered most clearly was Ramis’ betrayal: She had given the child a seeress’s name.
    The child will not be one, Athelinda promised herself. The lives of the seeresses are barren and grim with fearful magic, and they have no home to call their own. This child will live close to the hearth of her kin, and I’ll see she marries someone near—she will weave with me and stay by me.
    And so Athelinda took Baldemar’s first sword, one he cast aside in his youth, and placed it in Auriane’s cradle, hidden beneath the straw. She thought by doing this she would stunt any oracular powers that might develop in the child. Iron would pin her to the earth, to the everyday life of woman and man.
    And so all through her earliest days Auriane slept over a sword.

CHAPTER II
    S IX SUMMERS PASSED. T HIS WAS THE fourth year of the reign of Nero. Dusty evening settled upon the Subura, the saddest and poorest district of the imperial city of Rome. All the flies in the Empire, it was said, bred in this festering sink nestled between two great hills crowned with senatorial mansions. In the Subura prostitutes could be lured from shadowed places for the cost of a cup of boiled peas, and beggar children lamed by their masters so they could better incite pity fought with snake charmers and acrobats to wrest a few copper coins from citizens hurrying to the shops. Here thieves, tomb robbers, charioteers and