In their last meeting Crispinus had presented the high king with a gift of three hundred denarii, newly minted and shiny and bearing the image of Trajan. The gift was a token of esteem and friendship, and the centurion had not even known that the tribune had brought it with him. He had known about the sword, a new, perfectly balanced spatha, and was pleased at the evident joy with which Tincommius accepted it, and his immediate gift of it to Epaticcus. In return Ferox and the tribune were given horses, a couple of greys so similar that they might have been twins, and had by chance been born on the same day. Their names were Frost and Snow and they were a generous gift.

The high king had spoken frankly to them, his great hall almost empty apart from a few servants. Galla was there, standing tall behind the royal chair, but she did not acknowledge Ferox in any way. Tincommius told them that he feared that the Stallion meant to start a war. A year ago at least a thousand men served him, bearing his marks on their foreheads and hands, and now there were surely far more because men kept coming north to find him. Most were strangers to these lands, vagrants, dreamers and runaways – not warriors but filled with faith in his magic. The priest had gathered them all in a long-abandoned fort on the borders between the Venicones and Selgovae. There were thousands of them there a few weeks ago, and by now there might be many more, all daubing the mark of the horse on their heads.

‘It is a bleak spot, hard to access. I will no longer send food to him, and I do not know what stores he has. I doubt that he will stay there, for he must attack to show his strength.’ The king suspected that many true warriors, men from the tribes, would answer the call to war, and so might some chieftains. ‘Many more will come if victories show his magic to all.

‘You must stop him soon,’ he said, but the Stallion had left on the night of the feast and was more than a day ahead of them. ‘He can travel fast.’ With more reluctance, the high king explained that the druid had also gone, no one knew where.