"He is not mad... but he has power to drive others to it."

When Lucius Aurelius, commander of the Castasian mercenaries in service to the Torpani Empire is arrested for treason, he turns the world upside down. His mystified wife, faced with the Emperor's petulant proxy, must save herself and her children from their father's fate. His trusted aide finds himself motivated by more than sworn fealty when enlisted to help her. Emperor Maximian is forced to a judgment he would rather not make when Lucius, his best officer, twice refuses a direct order. The Emperor's Castasian courtesan is finally confronted by a truth she has denied for years - and an ancient power is roused in Lucius's eight-year-old daughter; a power that he alone must teach her to control before it destroys her.

Sentenced to public execution between chariot races at the Imperial Forum, he is driven to return to Nerona, where the world he has shaped is threatened by treachery closer to home, and where the past he abandoned has become his child's future...