Similarly she said nothing when Artorius began to abandon his old, much-repaired Roman armor and dress for a more traditional costume. He wore brightly colored braccae and cloaks, and when the weather turned colder a birrus, the hooded cloak that had always been associated with Britain. The effect was completed when he began to wear a handsome golden torc around his neck, looted by one of his officers from a Saxon raiding party. Though Regina spent much time in his company discussing practical matters, she never heard him refer back to his talk of starting a mint, or styling himself a magistrate.

Later, when Regina thought back, it seemed to her that the incident of the mass grave had been a turning point for Artorius: after that something hard and cold and old emerged in him, slowly becoming dominant. Or perhaps it was just the ambience of the ancient place they had come to reinhabit, their return to this old place of earth and blood, as if the age of the Roman peace had been nothing but a glittering dream.

Certainly, after that day, there had been no more talk of turning his country over to the emperors.

But none of it mattered, she told herself, so long as she and Brica were safe. The family: that was her only priority. Every night, as she lay down to sleep in the corner of the hilltop roundhouse she shared with Brica and several other senior women, she stared at her matres, carefully preserved across all these years, the three worn little statues perhaps older than this piled-up fortress itself, and said a kind of prayer to them—not to preserve her life, for she knew that was her own responsibility—but to grant her guidance.

On the evening of the Samhain, it felt like autumn for the first time, Regina thought. There was a hint of frost in the air, and her head was filled with the smoky scent of dying leaves. As she prepared to enter Artorius’s hall, she lingered in the open, oddly regretful to leave the last of the daylight behind—the last of another summer, now her forty-first. But it was Artorius’s feast, and she had no time for such reflections. With a sigh she entered his great hall.

The hall was already crowded, the torches of hay and sheep fat burned brightly on the walls, and she was bombarded by heat and light, smoke and noise.