AD 105. Trajan's legions are massing at the Danube, and a bridge no one believed possible is about to carry Rome's war machine into the last free kingdom in Europe.
Sinna is eighteen when the smoke reaches him ? a shepherd's son who has never killed anything larger than a wolf, watching his village burn from a ridge he's climbed a hundred times before. By nightfall his father is dead, his sister is all he has left, and the only thing standing between them and the men in iron is an enormous, half-wild dog who refuses to leave his side.
Marcus Aquila is twenty-eight, eleven years into a service he no longer questions, until he doesn't. A soldier's soldier, trusted by his centurion, loved by his best friend ? and increasingly haunted by a war that keeps asking him to do everything right and still watch good men die anyway.
They will never meet. They will never speak. But across two years of ambushes, fortress sieges, a bridge that reshapes a continent, and a final, devastating battle for the Dacian capital, Sinna and Aquila fight the same war from opposite sides of it ? bound by a hidden mystery neither of them fully understands, and by two men, one Roman and one Dacian, whose twenty-year-old shared tragedy neither will ever know the other carries.
Lupus et Aquila is a sweeping, ground-level story of the Dacian Wars ? Rome's final, brutal conquest of a kingdom that refused to kneel ? told through the eyes of the ordinary people who paid for an empire's ambition. A story about survival that doesn't care whose side you're on, loyalty that asks everything and explains nothing, and the quiet, unbearable cost of coming home to a peace that was never really peace at all.
Rich with historical detail and unflinching in its portrayal of war's cost, this is a novel for readers of Ben Kane, Harry Sidebottom, and Simon Scarrow ? and for anyone who has wondered what it costs the people standing close enough to see a war's true face.
