The Broken Eagle

Book One: Three BannersRome is burning. One ropemaker refuses to run.The old emperor is dying, and the Wolf of the Danube is marching on the capital. In the port of Ostia, Lucius Aelius Marinus spends his days twisting rope and his nights wondering whether the old bronze ring his father left him means anything at all. Then fire sweeps the docks. With nothing but a hundred and twelve dockworkers, fishermen, and carpenters, Marinus holds a narrow canal bridge against three thousand rebels.He wins the bridge. He loses twenty-seven men whose names he will never forget.That night begins a journey that takes him from the slums of Ostia to the battlefields of Italy, at the side of a gruff old centurion in a patched red cloak, a hot-tempered butcher with a heart as big as his fists, and a runaway rebel boy with a secret. People across the empire start calling him the Bread-Giver. But in a world ruled by wolves and generals, kindness makes a man a target.In the north, the cold and brilliant Severus takes the boy emperor under his protection and rules in his name. In the east, a young prince inherits a fleet and a grief he never asked for. Every time Marinus finds a home, it is torn away. Then a scholar in a lonely tower by the sea offers him a dangerous plan: let the empire break into three, and wait for the day it can be made whole.Now three hundred warships fill the harbor at Messana, and the scholar has seen something in the stars that he hasn't told anyone.The first volume of a sweeping two-part epic of loyalty, ambition, and sacrifice in a fictional Rome on the edge of collapse.Book Two: The Ropemaker's StarThree eagles. One empire. And a promise that refuses to die.The empire stands on three legs. Severus rules the north, Julius Nerva rules the sea, and Marinus, the ropemaker who became the Bread-Giver, holds the west. For a while, the balance holds.Then the wind changes.A harbor burns in a single night. An old friend is stabbed in the back by an ally. Grief drives a good man to the one mistake he swore he would never make, and seventy thousand soldiers march into an African summer that will test everything he believes. When the old generation falls, a quiet scholar is left to keep a dying man's promises and to raise his son to be the kind of emperor the world has never seen.Across the river waits Felix Opius, the patient shadow who has stood one step behind power for thirty years. He never draws his sword first. He simply waits.From the desert to the Pyrenees, from the fog on the Rhône to a small bridge in Ostia, The Ropemaker's Star follows the final struggle to make Rome one again. It asks what a person leaves behind when the battles are over.The conclusion of the two-part epic The Broken Eagle. Read Book One: Three Banners first.