The villa had been sited in a natural bowl of green landscape, with a fine view of the western hills. Once it must have been grand indeed, Regina thought — grander even than her parents’ villa — a complex of seven or eight stone buildings set around a courtyard, with barns and other smaller wooden buildings nearby.

But it had been abandoned long before she had first discovered it. Its tile-stripped roofs had already decayed, and weeds had choked the courtyard and had started pushing their way up through the floors. Since then things had only gotten worse, as nature had followed its inexorable cycle. The floor of what must once have been the bathhouse had been broken open from below by the spreading roots of an ash, and the rooms were strewn with dead leaves. Since her last visit, last autumn, fire had burned out one of the stone buildings, removing the last vestiges of the roof and leaving its interior a shattered and smoky mess.

Despite all the damage, though, she could still see the grand plan of the villa in the great rectangular pattern of its walls, and the stumps of the broken columns that had once formed a colonnade around the courtyard. But she wondered how long it would be before the mortar crumbled and the stones rotted, and nothing was left but hummocks in the green. It was as if the world itself were a constant foe, with its million fingers of plants and insects, frost, sunlight, and fire, a relentless destroyer of all human ambition.

Regina made for the largest building in the complex. Probably it had once been a reception room. The roof was long gone, save for a few stumps of rotting beams. The floor was covered by a litter of soil and leaves, and after years of exposure to the weather the painted plasterwork had crumbled off the wall in great sheets. The walls themselves were intact, and still the room impressed by its sheer size. But the room had long since been stripped of furniture, and even the little sockets on the walls were empty of the oil lanterns they had once held.

Regina got down on her hands and knees and started to comb through the dirt. After so long, anything large enough to be seen easily had long since been smashed or carried off, and the only hope of finding anything was a fingertip search, bit by bit. But in a time when even a shoe nail was precious, it was worth the effort. Last time she had been here, in fact, she had found a small perfume bottle. As she had raised it into the light she had been stunned by its symmetry and perfection compared to the crude bowls and wooden pots she was forced to use at home, as if it had leaked into this world from some better place. She kept the bottle in the little alcove she had built for the matres, and every so often she would hold it, and take it out into the light.

Through the ruined walls she could see Brica. She had settled to a heap of dirt in one corner of what might once have been a kitchen and was exploring it carefully. It was a disconcerting juxtaposition of images, her daughter in her grubby shift rooting under a wall that still bore the marks of shelving, and even a hint of flower-design fresco work. She knew Brica felt uncomfortable in such places as these ruins, as if she believed they were ghost-haunted relics built by giants of the past, as the children’s tittle- tattle had it. Sometimes Regina worried about what would happen if this unsatisfactory situation went on so long that the last of those who remembered died off, leaving only ruins, secondhand memories, and legends.

She thought about Bran. He was a little dull, but he really wasn’t a bad young man, Regina thought. And it wasn’t as if Brica had much choice.

There was no civic structure here; there was no nearby town or functioning villas. But as time had passed Regina and her people had settled into a loose community of neighboring farmsteads. They were somewhat wary — some of these hillfolk were very long established and were suspicious of newcomers — but they would help each other out with harvests or medical emergencies. And they would trade, vegetables for meat, a wooden bowl for a blanket of woven wool. If not for such contacts, Regina mused, it was probable none of them would have survived.

But the population was sparse. The land had drained as people fled south, dreaming of Armorica, abandoning even farms on the best land, driven away by the rumored advances of the Saxon raiders in the east and the Picts and Irish in the west and north. And in this empty landscape of ghost towns and abandoned farms, there was a paucity of suitable mates for Brica, that was for sure.

Regina’s opposition to Bran didn’t make much sense, then. But she was opposed even so. It seemed there was some deep instinct inside her about the destiny of her daughter. Yet when she thought hard about this her mind seemed to skitter away, like a pebble over a frozen pond. No doubt she would eventually figure it out.

Absently Regina brushed at the debris, she exposed a bit of floor, revealing scarlet, a patch of color picked out in tesserae. It was part of a mosaic.

With sudden eagerness she brushed aside the dirt with her forearm, exposing more of the mosaic. It showed a man’s face, large-eyed, bearded. The head was surrounded by colors, gold, yellow, orange, bright red, in a sunburst pattern. It might have been Apollo, or perhaps it was some Christian symbol. Though some of the gold-leaf tiles had been prized out by hopeful robbers, most of the colors still shone as bright as the day they had been laid down. With obsessive motions she began to clear more of the floor. It seemed wrong that such beauty should be wasted under dead leaves and crawling worms, as if the young man in the picture had been buried alive. Suddenly it struck her how the farmstead, much as she was proud of it, was a place of drab gray-green and brown, as if everything had been molded from mud. How she missed color! She had forgotten how bright the world used to be. She was carried back to another time, impossibly warm, bright, and safe, when she had crept into the ruined rooms of her parents’ villa and discovered another mosaic …

A single scream pierced the air. It was cut off suddenly.

Brica.

Regina’s thoughts evaporated, replaced by hard, cold fear. She got to her feet and ran out of the room.

Brica was standing in the kitchen. Her gray eyes were wide with terror.

The man behind her was taller than Brica by a head. He held Brica easily with one hand clamped over her face, and in the other he held a short iron sword with an elaborately cast handle. He wore a cloak of dyed wool. His blond hair was long and tied back from his head, and his drooping mustache was clogged with bits of food. When he saw Regina he smiled, showing yellowed teeth. He said something in a language she did not understand.

He reached down, dug the heft of his sword into the neck of Brica’s tunic, and let the corner of the blade cut through the soft wool. When he had exposed her chest he massaged her breast with the fingers of his sword hand. He seemed to enjoy the way she flinched when his cold metal touched her bare flesh. Again he spoke softly to Regina, as if inviting.

He was a Saxon, of course. She had seen his like before — scattered parties of them, riding west along the old Roman road. They had always kept on past the poor farms of this hillside. But now this Saxon had her daughter; now he cupped her whole life in his hands. It was as if the room expanded around her, as if time itself stretched, so that past and future were banished. There was nothing in the universe, no time or space, nothing but this moment and the three of them, locked in fear and calculation.

She forced herself to smile. It was the hardest thing she had ever done.