He nodded to the sentry as he entered the encampment. Off-duty soldiers fell silent at his approach, resuming the throw of dice only after he’d passed. One man spiked two fingers in his direction—a sign against evil. Lucius scowled at the ghost. By the gods! Why could he not control the compulsion to converse with his damned hallucination?
“Move aside,” he told it, and ducked into his tent.
An oil lamp flickered on the center table. Lucius took a steadying breath and lifted a bronze pitcher from the edge of a map detailing Emperor Trajan’s invasion of the East. The papyrus curled back on itself.
He poured wine into a goblet and drank, his parched tongue barely tasting the fragrant liquid. He made a short circuit of his empty cell. No doubt his secretary would soon return from the cooking fires bearing a meal that would go uneaten.
The ghost lounged on a cot, inspecting its fingernails.
Lucius gripped the cup until his knuckles turned white. “ ‘There is no case in which the soul can act without involving the body,’ ” he quoted, but the words gave scant comfort. Aristotle, it was to be assumed, had not been prone to delirium.
The tent flap lifted, admitting Candidus and the aroma of roasted meat. The stone-faced, balding secretary set the tray on the table midway between the curled map and the pitcher. He nodded at a flat wooden box partially hidden by a round loaf.
“The post courier brought a message, my lord.”
The ghost rose and drifted toward the table.
Lucius frowned and set his cup aside. “From Rome?”
“No, my lord.” Candidus peered at the label on the sealbox. “From Britannia.”
Every muscle in Lucius’s body tensed.
Candidus lifted the sealbox lid, revealing a shallow compartment flooded with wax. The ghost bent its head over the impression left by the seal of the sender and went very still.
“From Tribune Quintus Vetus,” Candidus said.
Lucius’s breathing ran shallow. He slid his dagger from its sheath, sliced the wax from the edges of the box, and extracted the thin wooden tablet underneath. Tilting it into the lamplight, he read the concise message once, twice, and then a third time.
“Distressing news, my lord?”
He looked up, disoriented.
“My lord?” In an unprecedented display of familiarity, the older man touched Lucius’s arm. Lucius dropped the tablet onto the tray. He gripped the edge of the table, fighting nausea more fiercely than he had ever fought a barbarian sword.
When at last he spoke, his voice held steady. “A report from the frontier fort Vindolanda. Aulus has been …”
He broke off, inhaled, and began again.
“Tribune Vetus sends notice. My brother is dead.”
Full Moon of Cutios, 117 A.D.
“Does the pain bother ye still?”
Rhiannon pressed her palm to her brother’s chest. Owein’s cheeks were no longer flushed. His breath came steady, with no hint of the rasp that had struck terror into her heart the night before. She searched for the pulse at his neck. It was slow, steady, and his skin was cool. That was good.
He shook off her hand. “The sickness be gone, little mama. Dinna worry so. I drank the potion ye brewed and your magick worked, as it always does.”
“The magick is nay my own. It belongs to Briga.”
“The Great Mother smiles on ye then, for when I woke my breath came easily.” He leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
Rhiannon’s heart melted as it had when she’d first held Owein in her arms fifteen winters past. She’d been a girl of nine and grieving for her mother, but the tiny babe had sparked a flame of joy. Russet curls so like her own clung to her brother’s neck, but his eyes were his own: bluer than the sky and sparkling with mischief.
She ruffled his hair.
“Nay, stop,” he protested, but his lips curved in a grin.
Rhiannon smiled back. Owein might have grown tall and muscular, with a man’s beard sprouting on his chin, but the lad who had hidden his face in her skirts was not yet completely gone. “How is the ache in that thick head of yours?”
Owein’s expression sobered. His gaze roamed the roundhouse, touching the center hearth and the high peak of the sloping roof timbers before he returned his attention to Rhiannon. “Tolerable enough,” he said with a shrug.
His seeming lack of concern did nothing to allay Rhiannon’s anxiety. “The night vision returned despite my spell,” she guessed. It was not a question.
“Aye. The same. Pain, then the dream. A raven in flight. Blood.”
A chill hand gripped Rhiannon’s heart. “An omen of death.”
“Perhaps not. It might just as easily be a prophecy of power.”
“Ye must tell Madog.”