The five of them were riding a hundred paces ahead of the main force with the line of outriders ahead of them. At the moment the woods were more than half a mile away, and otherwise the ground too open to hide many enemies. Soon, they would have to be far more careful. They were higher up the valley, some twelve miles from the fort, looking for the missing half of a patrol. The remainder had split away to follow a different path as they returned to Piroboridava and ought to have met up when they were almost home. There had been no sign of them, and still they had not returned, so Ferox had decided to go and look. Sabinus had argued, saying that they ought to wait or send someone else, but Ferox used his rank to make it an order. Apart from anything else, he was hoping for a little time to speak to the new arrivals when the grip of the army did not hold them all so tight. Bran and the other warrior were from a world beyond Rome.

Bran must be about sixteen by now, and it was an effort to see in the confident young warrior much trace of the boy they had captured on that desolate beach almost six years ago. He had grown, not so much in size or breadth, for he was still small even by the standards of the Selgovae. His tribe were not large people, but they were slim and much stronger than they looked in both spirit and strength. The Selgovae thought highly of themselves and did not bother to hide it, and he saw some of that in the boy, but far more, for his assurance was as much the mark of knowing his own skill. Bran moved like a cat, always careful, always balanced, his eyes steady and unblinking. If the lad drew the gladius on his belt then Ferox had no doubt that it would move as an extension of his hand, every cut and thrust fluid and practised. That was the training he had received in the last few years, taught by the Mother, that head of the strange cult living on one of the smallest islands far to the north west of Britannia. She taught a select few, boys and young women from the tribes, who passed her tests and survived the hardships of getting there and winning her respect, showing them how to use sword, spear or whatever came to hand as a weapon.

‘The Mother is pleased with my brother,’ Enica said, giving Bran a smile. Interrupting her education as a good little Roman, her parents had sent her to the island to become a warrior. ‘As she is of my sister.’ Bran had come with a woman a few years older than him, a Hibernian whose family had all been slaughtered in a power struggle within her tribe so that she had no home left to her. She had raven black hair, today coiled under a bronze helmet, and a beguiling, pale face utterly misleading in its softness. Her name was Minura and she did not say much, or at least had not done so far in Ferox’s hearing. There was a hardness in her eyes and the hint of great sorrow.