A world on the edge. A child gone missing. A war waiting to begin.
South Wales, AD 51. Antonia crosses the sea to seal an alliance Rome believes it has already won - a Roman bride for a king the empire calls tame. The first thing her new country shows her is a dead man staked at the tideline, wearing a strip of cloth from her own wedding chest.
Beyond the river waits a land Rome's mapmakers left blank: a drowned country of tides and hidden roads, of a people who keep no law but the law of the hearth - and who are done giving their children to the sea, to the legions, or to anyone else.
When a child goes missing, the fragile peace between two ways of ruling begins to come apart, and everyone - bride, king, queen, and household - must decide what they will spend to bring their own home.
"Neither cruelty nor clemency changed them." - Tacitus, on the Silures
A literary historical epic of household and covenant, of what a crown keeps and what it relinquishes, and of what it costs, in any age, to come home changed. First in a new series from the author of In Her Own Hand.