Two years have passed since the traumatic invasions of the Barbarica Conspiratio were finally suppressed, but in a Britannia still suffering sporadic raids by barbarians from beyond the frontiers there is said to exist a scroll listing the names of influential men – and women – plotting to secede from the Empire and use the taxes saved to boost the island’s defences.

And where:

Claudius Caninus (Canio) has unwisely disclosed a dream that told him he is the grandson of the long-dead usurper emperor Allectus, although he’s still unsure whether he actually believes the dream.

Aelia Aureliana, a charismatic young widow, is owner of one of the finest villas in the province and a worshipper of the sun god Helios/Sol – and also mysteriously certain that Canio really is Allectus’s grandson (but will not tell him why).

Tribunus Maximus, an army officer, suspects that Aelia knows the location of that scroll and is blackmailing Canio to find it for him.

But to do so Canio must get close to Aelia, and the closer he gets the more he falls under the spell of both the woman and her ambitions – which include them becoming emperor and empress of a breakaway Britannia.

Roman Britain, November AD 370.

Twenty-five years ago, as an old man lay dying in a cold city beside the Rhine, he told a five year old boy stories of the time, some sixty years earlier, when the rebel emperors Carausius and Allectus seized power in Northern Gaul and Britannia.

So why now, accused of bringing about the murder of a provincial governor by sorcery and under threat of execution, does Canio begin hearing the old man’s voice in his dreams? Hearing again the same stories and remembering the things that his child’s mind had long forgotten.

Past and present unfold in parallel – in wintry Londinium, across a stormy sea, in the warmth and bright sunlight of a May countryside, and finally back to a villa at the foot of the Long Limestone Hills.

And to a strange epiphany.