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beaten. Now, I must be going.” He gripped Ragnall by the shoulder. “I don’t expect you to heed my words, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Caesar has been a great benefit to you, but following others should not be a lifelong pursuit. One day, Ragnall, you should have the courage to remember who you are and pursue your own goals.”
    “Right.”
    Cicero smiled sadly. “Few have the courage to be their own person, but it is a noble goal.”

Chapter 6
    F ar from Rome, deep in the Roman-controlled western Alps, the druid Titus Pontius Felix sat on his bed in the well-insulated longhouse that he’d made his winter quarters. He’d had his pleasure with a dark-skinned slave and she’d left, whimpering but grateful to be alive. It was funny, Felix mused, that people always seemed grateful when you stopped being cruel to them rather than angry that you’d been cruel in the first place, assuming they were alive enough to display gratitude.
    Muffled sounds of his legion training outside penetrated the log walls. His Celermen and Maximen needed several hours of exercise a day and they didn’t seem to mind the bone-piercing cold of the mountains. Felix did, but he was cosy in the longhouse with furs and a large fire built from the wood of smashed grain stores and the corpses of the valley’s former inhabitants. There were gigantic baskets on either side of the fire, one full of wood, one full of bodies, both filled from larger piles outside. Semi-frozen bodies burnt marvellously well once they got going, radiating rosy heat and a wonderful smell. He wondered why more people didn’t use corpses as fuel. Bodies were easier to come by than trees in Gaul those days. It was possibly a waste to burn so much meat, Felix conceded, but he and his legion had herds of livestock which the mountain tribe didn’t need now, he didn’t like the taste of human flesh, and besides, there was a pile of dead the height of Pompey’s theatre, nicely preserved in the sub-zero temperature. If any of his troops wanted to eat human flesh, there was plenty to go round.
    Despite the warmth, the little Roman was unhappy. He’d recently ejaculated, which always put him in a black mood, but that wasn’t the underlying reason. There were two larger, more important things sullying his humour.
    First off, he was pissed off to be billeted up here in the mountains for the winter. His dark legion had killed so many in the Alps over the previous winter that Caesar had insisted that Felix stay with them this year to control them. He was, after all, the only one who could tell them what to do. It would have been a reasonable request if you gave a shit about the lives of a few thousand Gauls and Helvetians, but he didn’t and he knew that Caesar didn’t either. The general was more worried that the legion would become common knowledge in Rome if it killed too many people. Felix thought the opposite was true, since dead people didn’t spread rumours, but one didn’t argue with Caesar.
    The second, more irksome thing was that he’d have had Spring’s body by now if his assassination squad had succeeded, so he had to assume that she was still alive. Jupiter’s cock, it was annoying. He hadn’t told Caesar the details, but he had told him that there was a powerful druid in Britain whose magic could be used to conquer the world. It was at least part of the reason for charging up through Gaul to invade Britain. But Felix didn’t want to wait. He wanted to kill Spring, specifically to eat her heart, to inherit her magic and become unstoppable.
    He’d taken Thaya’s magic by eating her heart all those years ago. He’d known it was the right thing to do in the same way, he guessed, that birds knew how to fly and which berries to eat.
    He might send more assassins at Spring immediately after the winter, but probably he’d have to wait until they invaded Britain. Most annoying. He had little desire to go back to the island, although the notion of having