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charging warriors up through the mist.
    For the rest of his life, Cunomar remembered that battle as if he had taken part in it, flying as one of Briga’s crows in the air above his mother, guarding her and marking the enemy for death. He heard the drum of the hooves and the war cries of the warriors and knew the point when they gave way to the screams of the wounded. He smelled the blood and the horse sweat and the curdling acid of spilled guts and the first threads of smoke as the men and women of the she-bear carried brush and burning brands up the steep turf ramparts of the fort and set fire to the wooden palisade on top. He saw from up high the moment when the commander of the enemy forces chose to order his men out of the gates to fight in the open where the fires might not catch them and he knew, with a jubilation that lifted him cheering to his feet, that this was what his mother had planned and prayed for. He saw the brief hiatus in the fighting as the warriors withdrew to let the bulk of theenemy sweep out of the gateway and then the crash as of a breaking wave as they surged back in again, annihilating the foe. Through it all, his mother and father killed at the fore, copper hair and corn-gold making two beacons for the warriors to follow. At no point did it occur to him that his mother might die, or be injured. She was the Boudica. She lived to kill the enemy and Cunomar, her son—her only child—would do the same when his time came.

CHAPTER 3
    On the eastern side of the country, far from the chaos of war, Julius Valerius, second in command of the third troop, the Fifth Gaulish Cavalry, stationed in perpetuity at Camulodunum, woke to numbing cold. It gnawed into his dreams, which were bad, and made them worse until he woke. He pulled his cloak tighter and rolled over to lie on his side. It was too dark to see. Stretching a hand to the wall, he felt a slither of ice on the rough plaster where the breath and sweat of four men had frozen. His fingers were stiff. He blew on them and tucked them under his armpit, swearing aloud as the blood returned. The brand was the only warm part of him; a raven’s silhouette of fire still burned in the centre of his chest a full month after the iron had first seared his soul.
    He pressed his thumb to the scar, tracing the outline in the fragile, healing skin. The flesh beneath was not hot but a perpetual flame burned in the cavity of his chest as a reminder of the night in the cellar. The god might not have visited him, but it was the god’s mark that kept the baddreams from becoming disabling nightmares, or so he chose to believe. Lying in the dark, he would have liked to believe, as his fellow acolytes clearly did, that the brand gave him courage, that it made him one with Sol Invictus, that it joined him to an elite which those outside envied but did not fully comprehend. The last part of that might have been true—those who gave themselves to Mithras might possibly have become subject to the warped envy of those excluded from the god’s grace—but he could not believe the rest.
    On a good day, Valerius could persuade himself that he had never desired unity with the sun and his obvious failure to attain it in the god’s ceremony was of no moment. This morning, with the new governor installed and the threat of an eastern war increasing, he would dearly have liked to feel a measure of blind, uncomplicated courage, or simply to feel warm.
    He rose, stamping life into his feet and his feet into his boots. The water in the wash bowl was thickly iced. He broke it with rigid fingers and splashed the sleep from his eyes. He shared the room with three other junior officers of his troop: Sabinius the standard-bearer, Umbricius the actuary and Gaudinius the armourer. All three turned and mumbled restlessly in their sleep, but did not wake. Valerius was the only one of the four known for his early rising.
    Beyond the doorway, the corridor lining the barrack block was more still than