It had been eleven months since he wrote a word and his publisher was getting antsy about the six-figure advance which seemed to have evaporated in the company of his muse.

What could have gone wrong?

Was it the six-foot Swedish glamour model who now shared his bed?

Was it the fact he hadn’t seen his kids for ten of those eleven months?

Was fate smacking him in the eye for his arrogant hubris?

Or was it none of those?

Was it simply that every word of his seven bestsellers was written by the wife he left behind? 

©️jj 2019

The quiet that fell in the room was interrupted by the chatter of a printer going full pace not too far away. Sam quirked an eyebrow.
“Reports of exactly what I’ve found. Four copies. Can you?”
“Yeah. You go on digging.”
Jim looked at his older sons. “Twins. You wanna take the little men into the sitting room and maybe play a computer game with them.”
The twins each picked up a small brother. “Okay you two. Wanna go kill some aliens?”
Charlie turned his round-eyed and strangely wise gaze on his father. “You hunt the bad men. I will keep an eye on this lot.”
Jim barked out a reluctant laugh.
Sam quickly collated the reports and the four adults read them carefully, with Jim passing each page to Jamie as he finished with it.
When everyone had finished reading Rod made a disgusted noise in his throat and Jim swore bitterly.
“Okay. We now know who. But what the fuck are we gonna do. The man has money coming out of his ears, and it don’t look as if he is gonna rest while there is a Cracksman left alive.”
Patsy turned haunted eyes on her husband.
“I don’t even mind that much for me, but the boys…” her voice cracked.
“You can stop that right now, Mrs Cracksman,” Anna’s voice had quite the bite of a whip. “We need you out there fighting, not crawling up your own ass because you are afraid.”
Patsy sat up straighter in her chair, and her eyes flashed dangerously.
“Better.” Anna said briskly. “I’ve been talking to people in Russia, and I have some ideas.” Every eye turned to her as she ticked off points on her slender fingers. “One. This particular oligarch is actually clean. Two. No mafia connections. Three. No connection to organised crime. Married. Settled. Four. Devout member of the Orthodox Church.” Jim opened his mouth and she silenced him with an upraised hand continuing in a dry emotionless voice. “Yeah. I know. Turns out the two men shared a mother. But the dead guy was fathered by a vicious paedophile who had mother between the ages of ten and twelve. Threw her out when she fell pregnant. The ‘family’ took her in and adopted the child. Oligarch came from a later marriage. But our boy was raised by papa from the time he was seven.” She stopped and drew breath. “So. We have to persuade little brother of exactly what his older sibling was like. It’s our only chance this side of all out war.”
“And just how do we go about that?”
“It’s not going to be easy. But we do have some levers. Firstly, there’s a rather nasty little video on the darknet. It shows an unconscious Bill in a room full of instruments of torture with a voice over explaining what has been planned for him. My sources say the voice is recognisably your man. We need to get that to our oligarch’s parish priest. Secondly, Patsy gets to speak to a very old lady in Cannes and persuade her to tell her remaining son how she got his big brother.”
Jim looked mulish. “Why does it have to be Pats?”
“Because the lady has retired to a convent. No males other than sons and brothers allowed to visit.”
“Oh. But. She can’t go in there alone.”
“She ain’t gonna be alone. I’ll be with her.”
Sam opened his mouth, then shut it again.
“Fine. But me and some boys get to sit outside the place in case you need the cavalry.” It was Rod who spoke in a low dangerous rumble. “And yeah it has to be me. Jim needs to be with the kids. And Sam needs to be with Jim.”
Anna and Sam shared a look. It was Sam who spoke.
“Okay. But if you get yourself killed, Anna Henderson, me and Bonnie will never forgive you.”
“Fair enough. Now shut up while I try to find a conduit to a Russian orthodox priest.”

Anna worked on, with Jim and Jamie at her side doing drone tasks without complaint. Some three hours later it seemed she must have done all she could as she leaned back in her chair and groaned.
Sam went round behind her and rubbed her knotted shoulders while Jim looked around with a fierce light in his eyes.
“We have a workable plan,” he said with some satisfaction evident in his tones. “Now I need to talk to some people about insurance. Then maybe somebody will feed me.”
“You mind if I forage?” Pats asked.
“Be quite honest I’m so wrung out I’d even let Rod loose in the kitchen.”
“But I wouldn’t let him near the booze,” Sam capped Anna’s mild jest.
As a mechanism to release tension that worked as well as anything could have and the twins eyed Sam with ever growing respect. Cy even went so far as to offer a high five, which Sam accepted before ambling off to find liquid refreshment.

It was late that night before anybody got to bed and Anna lay across Sam like a limp dishrag. He stroked the velvet skin of her narrow torso and worried quietly.
“I’m sorry Sam,” she said softly. “I know that you must be beyond worried, but I have to go with Pats.”
“I know you do. But that doesn’t help with the pain in my chest.”
She stirred in his arms and plastered that chest with tiny kisses.
“That help?”
“Honestly not a lot. But I know I’m being a wuss and I need to get over it.”
She crawled up his body and kissed him with some intent…

Jane Jago

Sometimes it was hard to remember life before we fled the pogrom, although the endless foot slog and almost perpetual hunger served to remind us that we were welcome nowhere.

It was black winter when we fell in with a group of apostates. They had firewood, wagons, food, and they seemed willing to share.

Once we were warm and fed, Mother called us to her.

“The master says we can stay with this wagon train if I…”

“Can you?” Japheth asked.

“I can do anything to keep warm.”

When spring came we left, but Mother and the little ones stayed.

©️jj 2019

Let mine be the hands
That hold you as you sleep
Let mine be the arms
Into whose warmth you creep
Let mine be the feet
That walk each path you do
Let mine be the eyes
That watch the stars with you
Let mine be the strength
Upon which you rely
Let mine be the heart
That loves you till we die

©️jane jago 2019

Jonas got to the Hiring Fair just after dawn and headed straight for the place where soldiers’ widows could be found.

He saw her immediately, with the early morning sun setting her hair aflame. She was sitting on her trunk with a small girl child playing some complex game in the dust around her skirts. He strode over, and she came to her feet, albeit somewhat uncertainly. The child hid behind her, becoming all but invisible among the folds of shabby cloth.

“I’m looking for a housekeeper. One who won’t mind hard work and who don’t crave company.”
“Farmer are you?”
He nodded, suddenly feeling that his hands and feet were too big and his boots were too dusty. But she smiled.
“I’m a farmer’s daughter. Three-day ride to the nearest neighbour.”
“I’m not that far out. Just a day from town, so long as the roads aren’t frozen or flooded.” He found himself feeling unaccountably cheered by the idea this woman might consider him.

Before he had the chance to say any more he was roughly shoved aside by two big rough-looking men. They made way for a middle-aged man of the merchant classes, whose clothing proclaimed him as well-to-do and whose small close-set eyes stripped the woman of both her clothes and her dignity.
“You are hired,” he said.
“I’m sorry sir. I have already given my token to this gentleman.”
The man spat on the floor at her feet.
“Your loss,” he snarled before passing along the line of waiting women assessing each with his hard little eyes.

Under the cover of this rude bustle the woman quietly handed a small copper token to Jonas. He smiled ruefully.
“I won’t refuse this, although it isn’t much of a compliment being preferred to him.” He indicated the merchant with a jerk of one thumb.
Her answering smile brought a furtive dimple to one cheek.
“It truly isn’t, but I was going to accept you. If you offered.”
“I’m offering now. Twenty-five silver coins. Bed and board for you and the little girl. Plus fabrics to clothe you both.”
“That is more than generous.”
“Oh. You’ll work for it. The place hasn’t seen a woman’s hand since my sister married her man at Eastertide. Now. How do they call you?”
“I’m Hannah and this is Hepzibah”
The child gave him a gap-toothed grin and he responded with a smile of his own.
“I’m Jonas. Well met Hannah and Hepzibah.”

He bent and shouldered their trunk.
“Buckboard is this way.”

After a night spent on the road, they entered the farm at just before noon on a brisk morning.
“The house is about two miles now.”
Hannah smiled at him and he felt warmed by her smile.

He looked at the log and fieldstone cabin with suddenly critical eyes.
“It ain’t much,” he mumbled, and Hannah actually laughed.
“It looks nice and homely to me. If there were flowers growing in those beds by the door it would be perfect”

When the horses stopped, gratefully scenting their own stable, Jonas jumped down, turning to lift Hannah and Hepzibah onto the grassy bank that fronted the cabin. Hepzibah looked to her mother, and Jonas laughed.
“Let her run, she can come to no harm here.”
The little girl needed no second bidding and set off to explore, accompanied by one of the farm dogs.

Hannah walked into the house and set to work.

***

Three months later, with winter drawing in, the house and garden looked almost the way Jonas remembered it as looking when his mother was alive, and he derived a great deal of quiet pleasure in watching Hannah about her work. Being by nature both shy and taciturn he said little, although anyone with eyes in their head could notice how his face warmed and softened when he looked at his housekeeper and her child.

It was time for his last trip into town before the road became too difficult, and he found himself reluctant to leave the womenfolk behind. Hannah laughed kindly.
“Go on with you. We have the dogs and Jim Shepherd. We will be fine.”

On his way into town, Jonas mused on how much more pleasant was his life with two females in his house, and he remembered his father’s words about womenfolk with an inward smile. And then it was as if he heard his mother whisper in his ear.
“You know what you need to do, son.”

He hurried his business, eager for the comfort of his own fireside, and was home inside four days. Jim Shepherd came to the horses’ heads and the cabin door opened. Hepzibah flew out and he lifted her to his shoulder before grabbing two bags from the back of the buckboard. Jim led the horses away and Jonas carried the little girl into the cabin. Hannah was waiting for him with a smile and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to kiss her smooth brown cheek before sitting in his accustomed chair and drawing off his boots.
“It’s good to be home.”

Little more was said until after supper when Hepzibah was in bed asleep. Jonas took a sheaf of packages out of his inside pocket and handed them to Hannah. She took them, and then coloured with pleasure as she saw they were packets of flower seeds.
“I know my garden is plain and bare, and I know these will be no use until the spring…”
He got no further because Hannah surprised herself by kissing him on the lips.
“Thank you.”
He captured her face in his big hands.
“My father used to say that a house without womenfolk is like a garden without flowers. Will you and Hepzibah plant some flowers in my heart to go with the ones you will plant in the garden?”
Hannah couldn’t speak for the tears that clotted her throat. But she could nod.

And that was enough…

Jane Jago

Heavy footed men, their malice fuelled by false piety, surrounded the tumbledown cottage. The woman they called ‘witch’ awakened as their heavy boots entered the woods that surrounded her garden.

By the time they burst open the door and broke the windows the place was empty and silent. At first there was disappointment. Then somebody found the beer, the applejack, and even some precious usquebaugh. 

So they set fire to the cottage and had a party.

A crow in the mightiest oak watched the forest dwellers gut the drunken men with their bronze knives. 

Then she cawed and flew away.

©️jj 2019

I saw a flight of dragons once
Across the sunset sky
And as they rode the thermals
I wished that I could fly
The dying sun turned skins to gold
And wings to every hue
I thought that I knew beauty
But I learned that wasn’t true
I saw a flight of dragons once
They’re printed on my brain
I think I’d give my sight away
To see that flight again

© jane jago 2017

Challenge Accepted is an upcoming anthology of speculative fiction, featuring people with disabilities who rise to the challenge. This is an extract from Vicious Reality, Jane Jago's contribution to the anthology, featuring Alysson Kowalski from her novel Jackdaw Court.

“Man up,” I said briskly. “We need to know all you know about your little friend.” I threw him a wad of paper tissues and waited for him to get his stuff together.
“I met him about six months ago. At a wine tasting in the Napa Valley. He was the only other person there who didn’t talk like he had a stick up his ass. We had dinner.” Weaver’s voice was thready but he had himself in hand. “Wasn’t until we had met up a few times that I even found out he worked for Blue Ess. He’s only ever been here once other than today. That time we went to the guest house over by the western border of the property, so he has never been in the main house.”
“He ever ask you any stuff about the boss?”
“No. Never. We never talked about his work. Or mine.”
“Any other way he could’ve gotten info from you? Codes or the like?” Cyrus was less tactful than I maybe would have been but the question had to be asked.
Weaver shook his head. “No. I carry my codes in my head. And I don’t see how he could have got them from there.”
Cyrus grunted. “So why’d he pick you up then. Or was it just coincidence?”
Weaver looked truly miserable. “I don’t see how it can have been. I’m not a great believer in coincidence.”
I was thinking as hard as I had in a very long time.
“Lab,” I said curtly, “and we need to be quick.”
Cyrus fairly sprinted. Weaver was half a pace behind. And I kept pace as best as I could. Both men seemed to have caught my urgency as they had me in the computer lab with the doors locked behind us quicker than I would have thought possible. I went to a familiar tool chest and, swallowing a burst of nausea as I worried about the good, kind man in whose house I stood, I grabbed a handful of items.
“Weaver. Gimme your phone. Now.”
He was too surprised to do anything but accede, handing over a brand-new Galaxy. I opened the back and he paled.
“Don’t be a wuss Weaver,” Cyrus growled at him. “If she effs your phone up, I’ll buy you a new one.”
I showed them my teeth. “If I do break it, I’ll buy you a new one. Now shut up and let me work.”

Challenge Accepted is now available to preorder and will be released on 29 March!

August. A breathless night. Grandma shuffled onto the porch. 

With beer. 

It was icy.

“What? How?”

“Got the frigerator fixed.”

As we took the first reviving belt a voice spoke from the darkness.

“I’ll take them beers.”

“You gonna hafta come get em.”

Grandma dropped into her saggy old chair.

The guy who stepped into the lamplight was as big as a house and he had a Colt lined on Grandma.

But ten-gauge gauge trumps handgun, and Grandma right about blew a hole through him with the sawn-off she slid out from under her cushions.

“Cheers,” she said.

©️jj 2019

The opening of Dying to be Roman the first of the Dai and Julia Mystery novellas by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook.

Anno Diocletiani MDCCLXXVII Maius

“Notebook entry. Confirm date, Post Ides, Maius. Time, third night watch, at eight twenty three, near enough and location Augusta Arena, Londinium, Britannia Maxima. Looks like the report of a murder was not wrong. He seems pretty deceased to me.”
Under the brilliant lights of the pitch, which turned night into day, the body would have looked gruesome anyway. It had no face. But laid out as it was on a white sheet, the injuries seemed to stand out more. There was no blood but…
Dai wished he had not put quite so much garum on the chips he had been eating less than an hour ago. Even after more than eight years in the job he still found he had little stomach for the messier end of it. At least the hands seemed to still be intact, which made part of the process a lot easier. He pressed the touchscreen of his identipad against one finger and then entered the other necessary details. DNA and fingerprint checks both came up. Which was unusual as most murder victims were unregistered on either database. But when he saw the image he knew why this one was different.
This had once been Treno Bellicus ‘Big Belly’: one of the leading lights of the Caledonian Game team here in Londinium for the Games. That had to be more than ironic.
Dai, like every schoolkid in Britannia, knew that an arena had stood here since before the Divine Diocletian had rebuilt the Empire under his heavy hand, spreading his brand of Romanisation as far as his arms would reach and at the same time snatching back the privilege of being a full citizen from all born outside Italia. Back then, the arena had staged the kind of barbaric and bloody spectacles ex-patriot Romans expected. And now? In all honesty, Dai could not say it was too much different. It might include a ball as a sop to those who wanted to call it sport, but the brutality remained the same. The Games in all their savagery. Those who couldn’t be there in person to taste the dust and smell the blood could freely watch the spectacle on the screens on every street corner and in every public building. Bread and Circuses.
The prize that lured the finest athletes of the provinces to risk life and limb was otherwise unattainable Roman citizenship, and this poor bastard had been a star player. A broad-featured face looked out of the screen on Dai’s wristphone, wearing a manufactured snarl. Behind him was a virtual backdrop with sports drink logos and other product placements. Well, those sponsors had just lost one of their money-spinning assets.
Reluctantly, he returned his attention to the body and bent over it to peer at the visible injuries as he made his initial informal observations. It was as much talking himself through coping with the gruesome scene as anything of real value.
“Victim ID DNA confirmed. Body is supine. Been dead the last four hours. He looks like he has been laid out all ready for anointing and Charon’s obol. But placed on a white cloth that I’m willing to bet half my next salary is going to be a bed sheet. Body was bled out, through the throat – ugly gash there – and cleaned up before being put here. The other half of my pay is going on the certainty there will be nothing on the body we can use to ID the killer. Other injuries I can see -”
One of the disadvantages of being a plainclothes investigator was it seemed to lead to less respect from civilians, especially from Roman civilians.
“Llewellyn?” the voice was coolly condescending.
Even though he had told his decanus to keep everyone away, Dai was grateful for the excuse to straighten up and stop looking at the corpse.
The woman who stood there was in her thirties, with classic Roman features; she wore her fashionably short stola over close-fitting leggings and boots. For someone who must have been dragged out of bed in the small hours, she looked very well turned out and made Dai wish he could cover the small stain on his tunic where he had dropped a chip when the call to attend this crime came through. Her name badge declared her to be ‘Annia Belonia Flavia’ and said she was Curatrix Prima. No doubt in charge of this arena. She was frowning at him and he realised he must be staring.
“That is indeed who I am, domina.”
Behind her back he could see Bryn, his decanus, looking guilty. So he should, but Dai had the feeling this woman was not the kind to be easily put off.
“Do you know how this happened?” she demanded, as if it was Dai’s fault the body had been left in the middle of her pitch.
“Investigations are already underway,” he told her smoothly. “We have identified the victim and my people are questioning everyone who might have seen anything here.”
He had tried to put himself between her and the body, but she sidestepped and looked. Her hands went up to her face and the skin behind them looked almost as pale as the corpse, leaching into a light hint of green. To her credit, she recovered without vomiting, but she stepped back and took a breath before restoring the gravitas expected of a Roman matron.
“Who is it?”
“Treno Bellicus. You may have heard -”
“Of course I have.” She cut across him rudely as if wanting to reassert herself after the moment of weakness he had witnessed. “He is one of the contestants. He was reported missing days ago but you useless vigiles have done nothing about it.”
Dai took a breath and met her accusing glare with his own brand of gravitas.
“Well, you can be certain we are giving the matter our full attention now,” he assured her.
She snorted and stalked off.
“It strikes me that after two thousand years of unbroken Roman rule and all the incredible technological advances that has brought to the world, they would have figured simple things like that,” Bryn said, watching her retreating figure.
Dai glanced at his decanus, saw his expression and decided to bite.
“Things like what?”
“How to run a decent criminal investigation service. I mean clearly these vigiles she speaks of are cack. That poor woman, having to deal with such incompetents. It must be very trying for her.”
“I’ve met a few who really are,” Dai agreed, grinning, “but Roman citizens just have to man up and make do with the inefficiencies and restrictions of Imperial rule out here in the provinces. She should just be glad we have the most essential basics like hovercarts and the internet.”
“Yeah. I don’t know how the poor dears manage here in this primitive and barbarous land, so far from Rome where everything is always perfect.”
“If I didn’t know you better I might think you were abandoning Stoicism to become a Cynic, Bryn.”
“What? You have met my wife? And my half-Roman mother. With those women folk I’m a Stoic, man, through and through. I have to be.”
Dai laughed and shook his head, then they both turned their attention back to the very unfunny reality of the corpse at their feet.

Keep reading this for free if you claim your free copy of Dying to be Roman between 14-16 March and read Dying to be Friends for free too. All the other novellas are available at half their usual price.