Tensions only increase when Branan, the family’s youngest son, also vanishes. It’s clear that the sacred rites to bless her marriage to Ruso will have to wait. When the soldiers ransack the nearby farms looking for Candidus, Tilla’s tentative friendship with a local family turns to anger and disappointment. A native boy thinks he sees a body being hidden inside the wall’s half-finished stonework, and a worrying rumor begins to spread.
Having been forced to move off their land, the Britons are distinctly on edge and are still smarting from the failure of a recent rebellion that claimed many lives. Then Ruso’s recently arrived clerk, Candidus, goes missing.
The medicus Ruso and his wife Tilla are back in the borderlands of Britannia, this time helping to tend the builders of Hadrian’s Great Wall. She is married with two sons and lives in Devon, England.
With Hadrian's visit looming large, the fates of the legion, Tilla, and Ruso himself hang in the balance.About the AuthorRuth Downie is the author of the New York Times bestselling Medicus, as well as Terra Incognita, Persona Non Grata, and Caveat Emptor. Meanwhile his barbarian wife, Tilla, is finding out some of the answers-and marked as a security risk by the very officers Ruso is interrogating. Is the much- decorated Centurion Geminus preying on his weaker soldiers? And could this be related to the appearance of Emperor Hadrian? Bound by his sense of duty and ill-advised curiosity, Ruso begins to ask questions nobody wants to hear. As mysterious injuries, and even deaths, begin to appear in the medical ledgers, it's clear that all is not well amongst the native recruits to Britannia's imperial army. Back at his post as a doctor in the Twentieth legion in Roman-occupied Britain, Ruso uncovers a new danger even closer to home than the neighboring barbarians.
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