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I am a warrior, he says.Fighting is what I’ve trained my whole life to do.After a moment’s pause, he continues.It is a great honor here, to kill an enemy. His voice is some combination of offended and defensive.Every person in mytribe must at least attempt to take a life. Not even our women can marry until they do so.

Every Sarmatian must kill? Another wave of nausea rolls through me.

I think about the Roman legionnaires who massacred my family. I think about how I watched my house collapse in on my mother and brother, how I tripped over the lifeless body of my father. How I will never know what happened to my sister and that uncertainty will haunt me for the rest of my life. I think about the pain of surviving that night—the hunger, the beatings, the ugliness of being needed but unwanted.

Bitterness coats my tongue.Congratulations to you, then, on your many murders.

Mentally, I retreat from Memnon, trying to put as much distance as I can between his mind and my own.

Whatever fanciful daydream I made of Memnon, it’s been toppled by harsh, disappointing reality.

The boy in my mind is just as bad as the rest of them.

I don’t willingly speak to Memnon for many weeks. Even then, I’m bitter. Bitter at men who commit violence. Bitter that innocents pay for it with their blood.

During all that time, Memnon tries to talk to me. He explains himself, defends himself, pleads with me to listen.

I want to tell him that I cannot helpbutlisten, unfortunately. And itisunfortunate because, while I do not understand that other language he speaks, a few stray thoughts of his come to me in Latin.

Wish she would talk to me…

Miss her…

And those stray thoughts chip away my resentment. Maybe that’s why, when Memnon reaches out to me one evening as I’m folding finished garments for delivery tomorrow, I actually respond.

Or maybe it’s simply his request:

Tell me about your family, the one you were born into.

I swallow, setting the stola aside. I might not remember my family’s names, and I can only sometimes picture their faces, but I loved them.

There were five of us, I begin.My mother, my father, my brother, and my sister…

There’s not much to my memories in the end, but what I can recall, I share—like the warmth and safety of sleeping next to my siblings, my father’s graying beard and booming laugh, and the way I squirmed when my mother braided my hair. I talk about some festivals I don’t have names for, the flowers my sister and I would weave into crowns, and the smell of our house after my mother made one of her strange concoctions in our cauldron.

A part of me is aware this must be boring, but Memnon listens, and he seems genuinely interested—and maybe a little relieved—when he comments here and there.

How did you lose them?he asks now.

My mood shifts, like clouds smothering the sun.

Roman soldiers attacked our village in the middle of the night, I confess, the words rushing out.

Memnon is quiet, but I can feel sadness and a bit of horror well up in him.Did they kill your family?He seems reluctant to ask.

I nod, but of course he can’t see the action.

Yes, I force out.

That is why you hate battle, he says with sudden understanding.

I swallow but say nothing. I don’t need to.

What is life like for you now?he asks.

I blow out a breath. I can hear Livia’s voice in the courtyard below our apartment as she speaks with one of the neighbors and, beyond that, the bustling sounds of Rome filter in through the open windows. With it come the smells of the city—excrement and meat, smoke, and the faintest whiff of myrrh.

I take in the apartment—the loom, the piles of fabrics, the baskets of beads and yarn and thread. I look at the worn wooden table and the walls with their chipped green paint.