blue

A shield is not just for protection. It’s also for drawing attention. The face of Herne is painted white, and the iron boss will gleam in this bright sun. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s better than doing nothing. He plants the shield at the top of the stairs, driving the rim down between two bands of the metal walkway. Then he kneels behind it,

the old days when they planted apple trees on the Holy Island and the apples froze in the cold.

When people moved to a new home in prehistoric, Roman and medieval societies, just as in our own, they cleared their old dwellings more or less comprehensively, taking portable and precious items – clothes, furniture, tools, lamps and cooking vessels – with them. It might have taken a few cartloads between old and new homes. Immovable, broken, low-

So they went shoulder to shoulder and started pushing me out of the pack. Subtle stuff, at first. Somehow everyone knew about my cousin who’s in for dealing smack. Fingerprint results never made it to me, so I never found out about the link between my case and a whole string of burglaries.

This part’s always disagreeable, the brute scramble up towards daylight. He burrows through clay, grabs at roots, until the earth falls away and he’s looking up at a vaguely yellow sky.

He heads downhill, the earth squishing underfoot. His sword might be in the bog somewhere, hilt protruding from the wet earth. Hopefully he’ll just stumble onto it. That’s usually how this works, the various ancient forces of the realm conspiring to make things easier for him. That was always one of the perks of being in Arthur’s warband. You’d blu

The iron mirror is a curious artefact, in the Lady’s Barrow. It’s easy to leap to conclusions about this too, and to see it as simply a personal object – mirrors are so easy to come by today. But Iron Age mirrors are quite rare, and the workmanship that would have gone into making it – polishing and polishing it until it offers back a true reflecti

‘We are solving a mystery,’ said James, examining Grace with pleasure, and becoming extraordinarily handsome. ‘Would you like to see?’

“Prison can kill you. The person who leaves is not necessarily you, even though they have your appearance.”