Marilyn Todd - Widow's Pique

The stadium lay in the bowl of a ring of low hills, at the confluence of the two rivers that fed the fertile red plain that in turn swept down to the Adriatic half a mile distant. In true Histrian tradition, the joining of these waters was marked with an ancient oakwood shrine, overflowing with gifts and donations to the cat goddess, from offerings of food to ornate, painted terracotta plaques. In addition, the spirits of the rivers were appeased with chaplets of wildflowers, though those who could afford it consigned more precious objects to the rushing waters and the river beds glistened with silver and bronze.

After prayers had been sung to Kikimora, including one eardrum-piercer by a group of children whose faces had been painted to resemble cats, it was time for the competitors to take their oaths beneath the sacred oak tree, holding a flint arrowhead in each outstretched hand as they swore on Perun's thunderbolts that they'd play fair.

'Too jolly right!' Rosmerta muttered in Claudia's ear, as she shook the drips off her pudgy hands after sacrificing an amulet to the waters. 'This society can't afford to tolerate cheating, that's why the fines are so hefty, and if the rogues don't cough up, tough. The onus falls on their family.' Rosmerta grinned. 'That fear alone keeps them honest.'

Can't afford to tolerate cheating? How did that square with Kazan and Vani, then, because, overweight, overdressed and overbearing she might be, but Rosmerta was no fool.

As the athletes drew lots for their starting positions, Drilo the High Priest beckoned Claudia over.

'Place of honour, my dear,' he said, patting the seat between Mazares and himself.

It was interesting that on Mazares's left sat a certain patrician investigator. You'd think, wouldn't you, that when you're trapped on an island in the middle of nowhere, the arrival of the Security Police would have been reassuring? Instead, Orbilio didn't believe a single word of what Claudia told him, despite the evidence to back up her story — and that was Mazares for you. He'd used friendship and charm to suck Marcus Cornelius into becoming a pawn in his conspiracy, and the only thing she could hope for now was that Orbilio hadn't passed her opinions on to Mazares.

'Thank you.'

Claudia smiled deep into Drilo's penetrating blue eyes, inhaling the heady scents of incense and myrrh that emanated from his strong, bearded features. White robes didn't suit him half as much as the rich colours he usually wore, but they accentuated the gold headband round his braided, oiled curls, and the amulets of electrum that encircled each wrist. There would, she decided, be no half measures with Drilo.

The first race of the day was the women's, and Claudia wasn't the only person to be taken by surprise when several Amazons stepped up to the starting slabs and slotted their toes into the grooves.

'I don't believe it!' Mazares shook his head in despair. 'That bloody woman is going to be the death of me,' he said, fixing his astonished gaze on Salome, who was standing shoulder to shoulder with Vani on the starting line.

Her skirt had been kilted up to her thighs, her red mane was tied in a bun at the nape of her neck and, cheering her on from the sidelines were Mo, Naim, Tobias and Silas.

'One minute she tells me there's too much work to get away, now she's wasting whole days at a time on bloody foot races!'

'Thank your lucky stars Lora isn't running as well,' Pavan growled from Orbilio's other side, and Claudia's interest in track events suddenly clicked up a notch.

After the fires, Mazares had despatched men to help repair the damage, but Salome refused to allow them to set foot on her land. Why? Thieves falling out? And what exactly had brought Orbilio all this way from Rome…? To complicate matters further, it was obvious that the Amazons were late entries to the competition, because Vani won the race by a comfortable margin. The crowd roared and stamped when she cartwheeled over to accept her crown of olive cut from Kikimora's own sacred grove. When she cartwheeled off again, the spectators nearly went wild.

'Not like Rome,' Mazares murmured, watching Salome's friends bestowing consolatory pats on her back.

'Not quite, no,' Orbilio agreed, shooting a sly smile to Claudia, who categorically refused to meet his eye.

Dammit, she'd petitioned the Senate a dozen times that women should be allowed to hold their own competitions, but the notion was jeered every time. A woman's place, the Senate insisted, is to organize her household and raise her children, and Claudia wished now she'd put her own name to those damned petitions. Show them that women were perfectly capable of succeeding in whatever walk of life they damn well chose, but, of course, that would only get the authorities poking about in her affairs — and she wasn't sure that being arrested on joint charges of fraud, tax evasion and those other little misdemeanours would be beneficial to the sisterhood's cause.

After a couple of other races, it was time for a break and, as the heat of the day became trapped in the valley, people took the opportunity to shift seats in search of shade and fill jugs of refreshing water from the rivers. Claudia thought it was time she took an opportunity herself.

'Tell me about the King,' she said to Drilo, as the pentathlon began. 'Tell me everything you know about the man I'm going to marry.'

Because a theory was beginning to form.

It had started last night, when, lying in bed and unable to sleep, Claudia realized there were two separate parts to this puzzle and that she was no closer to understanding either. Until now, she'd only considered the puzzle from the conspiracy angle, simply because of its immediacy factor. As a result, she had ignored the other side. The side with the King's head on it.

All right, let's start from the beginning. The King needs an heir and the King is a friend of Orbilio's, who promptly puts her name forward as a potential candidate.

The reason for Orbilio's actions had yet to be established, but she was damn sure it was unscrupulous. Dammit, when promotion hinges on halting a one-woman crime wave, she's the very last person you recommend to royalty. Especially when Orbilio was aware of her slum-dwelling past, and knew her to be the very antithesis of Histrian values! Claudia's personal belief was that it was a trap. Something he and the King had cooked up between them, hoping to catch her in the act of stealing valuable artefacts from the palace or palming him off with table wine when it was billed as vintage.

In which case, everything after made sense.

But! What if the King was dead?

Suppose he'd been taken ill, like he and everyone said, too ill to travel to Rome, but suppose he then died? His only son had been disembowelled by a mastiff on a recent hunt and his daughter was also cold in her grave. That left the King with no heir. Exactly what the conspirators had contrived — except now they'd been gifted a heaven-sent opportunity. The King's letter requesting the hand of a wine merchant's widow in marriage!

With Histria prospering under its imperial patronage, why should the people question their widowed King taking a bride to unite his country with Rome? In their eyes, this would be no worse than any other inter-tribal marriage, and thus, having sold that lie publicly, all Mazares needed now was someone he could pass off to Claudia as the King. Of course, this would take some organizing, but it explained why he'd isolated her out here on Rovin, and who better to help his plan run smoothly than a free-spirited Roman girl with no ties? No family to chaperone her, no friends to counsel her, no one to whisper caution in her ear, he must have thought it was his bloody birthday.

Last night, as her thoughts drifted on the mellow night air, the notion had seemed far-fetched. But how implausible was it, exactly? As she'd taken that early-morning stroll round the cemetery, she was again struck by the extraordinary lengths that had been taken to eliminate the King's bloodline over the course of many years. Such coldness and deliberation had to be for a purpose other than greed or revenge. Some kind of insurrection, she suspected. The establishment of a new regime, since there were no contenders left for the old one.