Later he wondered at the expense of that: frankincense cost more than its own weight in gold. The stench of burned flesh drowned in a flood of sweet smoke as someone threw a fistful of incense onto the brazier. He forced himself to silence but need not have done the noise of one man was lost in the echoing chant of forty male voices. It wrenched at his breath in a way that wounds taken in battle had never done.

Fire, and something worse than fire, wrapped his heart, closing tight, like a fist. When the masked centurion wiped the wine down the line of his breastbone and pressed his thumb in the centre to mark the spot, he leaned forward to meet the pain. Now, kneeling tied and blindfolded in the claustrophobic dark of a wine cellar, beneath a house that was less than three years old and with the snuffed wicks of the candles sending rank smoke into the dark, he yearned for the touch of the iron.

Then Ben had fought the men who held him down, and it had been done badly so that the wound had festered and he had nearly died. He had been branded once before, long ago, when his name was not Julius Valerius. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. This is a heart-stopping story of war and of peace of love, passion and betrayal of druids and gods in a world where each life is sacred but each death even more so. While in distant Rome, the Emperor Claudius holds the balance of lives in their hands. Caught between them are two children, son and daughter to two of the greatest warriors their world has ever seen. Each stands on the opposing side in a brutal war of attrition between the occupying army and the defeated tribes, each is determined to see the other dead. In AD 60, Boudica, war leader of the Eceni, led her people in a final bloody revolt against the occupying armies of Rome - the culmination of nearly twenty years of resistance against an occupying force that sought to crush the vibrant native civilisation of our island home.DREAMING THE BULL continues the story of Breaca - now hailed Boudica, the Bringer of Victory, and her half-brother, Ban, now an officer in the Roman auxiliary cavalry.

Dreaming the Bull by Manda Scott