The False Druid (English Edition) ibook

AD 60. Rome has just burned Mona to ash. One man decides fear can do what a sword cannot.

The Druids are dead, their sacred groves put to the torch, and a young salt-trader named Branos has watched enough of it to know his settlement is next. He has no warband, no army, no chance in open battle. What he has is a robe, a staff, and every rumour Rome's own soldiers have ever whispered about the vengeful gods of this island. So he becomes something he isn't — a curse in the dark, a shape on a distant ridge, a legend built from smoke and nerve and nothing else. By day he is only a trader, weighing salt at the market, praying no one looks too closely.

Titus Vibius Varro is the least regarded of six Roman tribunes, left behind with two hundred exhausted, superstitious auxiliaries to hold a coast that Rome has already half forgotten. He doesn't believe in ghosts. He believes in discipline, in patience, in doing right by men who were promised glory and given mud instead. But patience has a price, and there are officers under his own command who think he's paying it in blood that isn't his.

As one man's fear-built legend grows beyond his control, and the other's restraint runs out of road, two adversaries who have never met are drawn toward a reckoning that will cost both of them more than either expects — and leave neither side certain, in the end, what the peace actually bought.