Trajan squinted up at the sky. “Sun’s breaking out.”

“Good.” A sunny day, a battle, an attempt to save the Empire from civil war . . . perhaps he’d even die, and then his father might be proud of him again.

A lathered horse skidded to a halt before him, spraying icy mud from its hooves. The scout tumbled off and saluted. “Commander, Saturninus has been spotted. The Eleventh and the Fourteenth march from the northwest.”

“Auxiliaries?” Trajan rapped out.

“No sign yet, sir.”

“Good.” Paulinus loosened his sword in its scabbard. “Deploy first division.”

Yes. A very good day to die.

“Advance!”

THE shield formation had broken, Saturninus’s men leaving their disciplined rows for individual battles. The snow was scarlet and the battle raging. Paulinus sat tense and narrow-eyed, trying to take it all in. “Advancing on the south side?” he barked out as Trajan pulled up his squealing horse with a skid of hooves on slush.

“Holding ground.” With the reins doubled around his fist and a sword in his hand, Trajan looked like Mars come to earth. They had to shout over the cries of wounded men, the battle yells of victorious legionnaires, the thump of hooves and metallic clash of shields. “No sign of Saturninus.”

“He’s back there.” Paulinus pointed to a knoll by the riverbank. He could hardly keep still in his saddle. He dripped sweat inside his armor, wishing for Trajan’s calm, longing to charge in and fight as the legionnaires could. “Keeping well back.”

Trajan added a few choice comments about their enemy’s appearance, ancestry, and sexual tastes. Paulinus laughed grimly. Aides hovered, waiting to be deployed, but there were no orders to be given now. Just a hard slugging match.

The sun had broken through the clouds, and it beat down on the battleground in hard glittering rays. Under the onslaught of armored feet and sunlight, the grunts of battling men struggling back and forth with their armored shoulders locked fast against each other, the hard-packed snow was breaking down into slush. A legionnaire—Paulinus’s, Trajan’s, Saturninus’s, who could tell—slipped in the bloody slush and died screaming, fishhooked on another man’s gladius.

“Do you think we—”

A long bubbling howl cut him off. They both spun around toward the woods.

“Savages.” Trajan spat out strings of curses. “May they rot in Hades—”

Paulinus spurred his horse up a steep embankment, trampling the body of a legionnaire who had fallen with a spear through his eye in the battle’s first minutes. “Hades,” he echoed.

“What do they look like?” Trajan shouted up.

“Chatti, probably. A good eight hundred. Clubs, wolf skins, tattoos.” Paulinus raised his voice to his aide. “Sound the signal.”

The trumpets blew short blasts, and the legionnaires braced in their lines. The Chatti coursed down out of the trees like wolves, howling murder to their foreign gods. A champion at their forefront, waving a stolen Roman shield on which the unlucky legionnaire’s head had been mounted, screamed a challenge out to any man brave enough to approach. The tribesmen behind him took up the howl, crying for blood like a pack of wild animals run out from some arena of hell. A distant cheer went up among Saturninus’s men. Paulinus fingered his sword hilt, blood drumming in his veins. Closer they ran. Closer. Toward the frozen snake of the Rhine. Paulinus was done waiting—he’d charge into the thick of it and take their champion himself, mount the man’s head on his own shield and send him gibbering back to his demon hell . . .