Every day in December, until Christmas, the Working Title Blog will have a free book for you to enjoy!

🎶 On the second day of December my true love sent to me…

Aliens Crashed in My Backyard by Mike Van Horn, Book 1 of the Agate and Breadbox trilogy.

Selena, a singer, decides to nurse the surviving alien back to health and help it return home.

She also keeps the crashed spaceship. And the AI named Wanda.

Do you think that was selfish of her?

Oh, but what adventures she had! 

Free today on Amazon!

Every day in December, until Christmas, the Working Title Blog will have a free book for you to enjoy!

🎶 On the first day of December, my true love sent to me…

Twelve Tales of Christmas by Jane Jago

Get in the festive mood with a dozen Christmas-based tales – from the tender to the savage…

Free today on Amazon!

Dying to be Roman by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook is a whodunit set in an alternative modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules.

Some ten days had passed and although Marcella had yet to be apprehended, more than a few minor players were already facing the judgement of whatever gods they subscribed to – courtesy of the pre-Game ‘entertainments’ at the Augusta Arena. None of this made Julia feel any better. Frankly she was going stir crazy.
Decimus had kept her back after dismissing Dai once the hilarity over Bryn had faded.
“And you get to stay indoors too.”
She had lifted a shoulder.
“I mean it. You know Lydia always hated you and I wouldn’t put it past her to have had more than some rather sorry toughs lined up to cause you trouble. So I’ll have your word.”
She had not liked it at all, but she had promised.

They made an odd sort of household. Decimus had granted Dai guest status, giving the Vigiles a room in his own extensive apartments instead of in the barracks. This was something Dai clearly struggled with at times, not being used to the semi-formality of a Roman family setting. But he rose to the occasion in a way that made Julia feel a strange pride.
Decimus was often too preoccupied with events, including organising his wife’s appropriately lavish funeral, to keep her fully updated. But Dai, whose own freedom of movement was restricted to only being out with the protection of his men and an attached praetorian, actively sought her advice. This was a surprising turn of events and Julia found herself looking forward to her conversations with the prickly Celt.
To her secret pleasure, her womanly intuition told her that she wasn’t alone in finding a great deal of pleasure in their conversations. She began to have a sneaking impression that Dai was finding extra reasons to spend time in her company above and beyond the mere sharing of intelligence. She even wondered sometimes if he might not have started looking at her in a way that suggested he was far from oblivious to her as a woman. And that was a thought to ponder with more than a little pleasure.
But…
It was a beautiful morning, and the thought of another day inside four walls was scraping her nerves raw. Dai must have sensed her frustration because he looked up from his bread and honey and made a suggestion.
“Would a visit to the baths help?”
“It should be safe enough,” Decimus agreed, “and you do stink.”
Julia threw her bread at his head with unerring accuracy.
“Spado,” she said, entirely without heat. “But I would like to get out for a couple of hours.”
“Okay then,” Decimus waved a thick finger, “but you take Edbert and a couple of my boys along as muscle.”

Thus it was that a couple of hours later two Praetorian guards were idling in the atrium of the very expensive bathhouse favoured by the Roman elite of Londinium society, trying to pretend they were nothing to do with the uncouth Saxon who leaned on a wall cleaning his nails with a dagger, while Julia and Dai shared a private steam room, having both made good use of the gym equipment in the exercise rooms. 
In a nod to public morality, he wore a loincloth and she a short backless garment that just about covered her modesty. She couldn’t help a covert look under her lashes to discover that although his skin was as white as milk, his muscular torso was liberally sprinkled with springy-looking black hairs. For some reason, she found her very fingertips wondering how it would feel to touch the hairs on his chest and the thin line that marched down his flat belly towards his loincloth. She sat on her hands, and looked up into his face. There were laughing devils in his eyes that she had never seen there before.

“A copper penny for your thoughts, Domina Julia.”
“None of your never mind, Llewelyn,” she tried to sound severe but even to her own ears her voice sounded thin and strained.
“Relax, my lady, I’m not about to jump your bones. It would be a little difficult to explain to the Tribune. Not to mention a pair of hairy praetorians in the atrium.”
She snorted.
“That’s not my worry. I’m more concerned about what might happen if I jumped your bones.”
He looked at her for a moment, his eyes searching her face as if he was unsure whether she was teasing him or not, then laughed deep in his chest.
“If we were somewhere less public, I might just call you on that,” his voice was deep and lazy and Julia felt it reverberate through her body like half-remembered music. She must have blushed, because he put one finger under her chin and gave her the grin she was becoming so familiar with.
“When I first saw you, I thought you were a little boy. How wrong can a man be?” He dropped his hand, but his gaze remained heated and Julia found it difficult to regain her breath.
“Are you flirting with me, Llewelyn?” she heard herself actually purring.
“Oh no. This is far more dangerous than mere flirting.”
“Really? You think it’s not dangerous to flirt with me?”
She turned her face to him in mute invitation, wondering if he had the courage to back up his words with a deed. He did not disappoint. Dai grazed her lips with his own and she sighed. He leaned away from her but kept his eyes on her face. Julia looked away first and he touched her cheek before grunting in a dissatisfied manner.
“Not here. Not now. Not like this. Please talk to me before I get us both arrested. Or more likely just me.”
Julia mentally acknowledged the truth behind his comment. It seemed wrong to her to even consider their respective positions in society, but they needed to be thought about. Even though he was a man with a legitimate family lineage and she was a product of the slums whose mother was a whore, she was still a Roman Citizen and he wasn’t. 

She sighed.
“What would you like to talk about?”
He thought for a moment.
“The Tribune and Boudicca. Do you think they are…”
“Almost certainly, but I haven’t actually asked.”
Julia leaned forward and dipped another ladle of water onto the hot stones. When she leaned back, Dai’s face was a picture of pity.
“What?” she asked a tad testily.
“What happened to your back?”
“Oh. That. That’s what happens when a party of Mongol slavers has you and you don’t prove yourself biddable enough.”
He lifted her hand to his cheek.
“So much courage in such a small body.”
She snorted.
“Courage or stupidity. Call it what you will. I’d have been better off capitulating. They might have raped me less brutally.”
He turned her hand and kissed the pink palm.
“And yet you don’t hate men.”
“No. I did for a while, but you can’t stay bitter forever.”
“Many would. And the Tribune was right.”
“What did the old fool say?”
“Only that you have the sort of courage and integrity that shames most men.”
Julia mentally beat her foster brother about the head and face before turning a smiling face to Dai.
“So that means he told you the sorry story, does it?”
“Just the outline. He wanted me to understand how it had been for you. I don’t, of course, but I do at least know you are not a spoilt patrician.”
“Indeed I’m not.”

“May I ask you one thing?”
She lifted a shoulder.
“Ask away.”
“How did the slavers get you? In Rome?”
“I wasn’t in Rome. A group of orphan children of vigiles parents who had died in service, were sent north to the mountains to avoid the summer heat. Only the charitable patricians who organised the trip actually sold us to the Mongols and put it out that we had been abducted. They had pulled the same scam with other groups of orphans but, fortunately for me, unlike the others the Vigiles were not going to accept nothing could be done or abandon their own without a fight. It should have been a huge scandal, but money changed hands and it was all hushed up.” She paused as she realised something for the first time. “I think that is why justice is so important to me.”
Dai swore for quite some time, and, for reasons she wasn’t prepared to analyse, this gave Julia a warm fuzzy feeling in her stomach. When he calmed down, their talk became general and light-hearted, as if they both realised there were things they needed to say to each other, just not quite yet.
After steam and massage, they were forced to separate as the actual baths were segregated. Julia found herself alone in the female caldarium, and allowed herself to float in the hot water enjoying the looseness it promoted in her limbs. She let her mind drift back to Dai Llewellyn in all his almost edible masculinity and a small smile spread across her gamine features.
She was so lost in her daydream that she didn’t even feel the blow that rendered her unconscious.

VI

There were two other men in the hot bath, lazily reclined and talking in low voices. They were both, Dai could not fail to notice, wearing heavy Patrician rings so even when naked they were still marked out as superior beings, paunches and all.
“It is incredible who they allow in here nowadays,” one said, his eyes flicking contemptuously over Dai. “Shouldn’t be allowed.”
“I didn’t think natives were allowed in these baths – never seen one before, anyway,” his companion agreed. “I’ll have a word with the curator, we can get it removed.”
Dai was grateful the heat had already made his skin very flushed or his reactIon to their words might have been visible, as it was he decided it was not worth creating an issue that might fall back on Julia to deal with as she was the one who had signed him in as her guest. That was the only way any non-Roman would be allowed in a public premises deemed ‘sub aquila’ – where you had to walk under the eagle on the portico to get inside, and it meant she was personally responsible for his behaviour. So, instead, he curtailed his bathing and pulled himself out of the pool on the far side to from where the Romans lounged.
He had to walk past them to leave the pool room and as he did so, one made a crude gesture with one finger, his patrician’s ring glinting gold. Dai froze mid-stride and turned back, fists balling as he did so.
“At least,” he said tightly, “I have a real dick and not just a picture of one on a ring.”
The water beside him erupted and he decided not to wait whilst the two heaved themselves from the water like bull seals onto a rock. Forgoing Roman tradition, Dai bypassed the cold bath and dressed quickly, vaguely aware of one of the two praetorians explaining to his irate fellow bathers that if anyone was going to be ejected from the baths it would be them and not the esteemed guest of their Tribune’s foster-sister.
He was still red-faced and not feeling happy when he stepped out of the lift and into the rooftop restaurant where he was meeting Julia. It was the sort of place that on his own meagre salary he would have struggled to pay for a starter. There were waving fronds of palm trees and wall-sized tanks of tropical fish, a central water feature and tables both sheltered in the gigantic greenhouse or available on an open terrace overlooking the Tamesis.
Dai found mention of Julia’s name had him led by a silent servitor to one of the more secluded tables, made almost completely private by the positioning of various flowering shrubs. He ordered a jug of the house Falernian and hoped it would appeal to Julia’s palate. The menu made him feel a strong nostalgia for his usual favourite eating-out option. But he somehow doubted they would run to a garum and chip butty in this establishment.
He read through the ‘Prandium’ menu and wondered if he should settle for dove, or thrush, or splash out on a peacock salad. He usually preferred to avoid larger fowl when eating anything Roman as you never knew what it might be stuffed with, but this promised ‘Wafer-thin curls of delicate roast peacock flesh, braised with honey and served on a bed of rocket and watercress.’
It seemed the best of an unattractive range of options. He wondered if Julia would want something more traditional and pondered the idea of watching her crunching baby mouse bones. It occurred to him, then, with a slight shock of surprise, that he could forgive her even that. He glanced at his wristphone and realised more time had passed than he had thought since they had parted; and she should be joining him any moment. The thought tripped up his heartbeat and he poured a glass of the Falernian, sipping at it to try and distract himself.
He was reaching to fill up the glass for a second time, then stopped and checked the time again. Unless she had decided to go for a full-on makeover, surely she should have been finished by now? Then he remembered something so stunningly simple his blood ran cold.
Marcella Tullia Junius was a woman.
He left the restaurant at a run, almost throwing the distraught servitor demanding payment out of his path. Using his wristphone he first contacted Edbert, who barely let him finish before swearing loudly and breaking off the call. Guessing that meant the burly Saxon had not seen her either, he quickly informed the praetorians so they could hopefully prevent Edbert bursting into a room full of naked Roman matrons. The screams told him he was too late.
They were all too late.
Julia had vanished.

We’re clearing the decks of the blog for a massive and exciting December event. So if you have been enjoying the story thus far and want to know how things turn out, you can snag the full novella here for FREE!

Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

H is for Hot Tubs.

A man with a very strange accent phoned me today. He seemed to be under the misapprehension that he could sell me an outdoor bath. That wasn’t what he called it, but what else is a fecking great tub of hot bubbling water in the garden…

It would, he assured me, be just the thing for family parties. And simply super for romantic evenings with my significant other. He was so enchanted by the picture he was painting that I put the phone out in the garden and went back to watching some halfwit trying to cook a hugely complicated chocolate sculpture – of which more another time. 

For now let us examine the idea that my life might be completed by the addition of a ‘hot tub’. There are so many holes in that hypothesis that I’m not even sure where to start. Let’s just jump in at the deep end shall we? 

*Laughs immoderately at her own joke and lights a ciggy*

Number one: romantic with my ‘hubby’ as the geezer on the phone referred to the late Mr Granny. The late rather points out the little

difficulty here.  Besides which, even if he was still favouring me with his presence and the occasional uprising of his wrinkled willy, what woman in their right mind wants to share a tub of hot water with a person who is going to fart in the water to make his own bubbles…

NB. My current significant other is a Jack Russell terrier whose water aversion is only equalled by how hard he bites anyone trying to introduce his rotund little person to anything wet.

Number two: family parties in a bubble bath? The thought of the bodies of most of my family without significant amounts of fabric coverage is sufficient to frighten the stoutest of heart. And those who aren’t already wrinkled and wobbly are young and randy.

Think about young and randy for a moment and consider what such persons might find to do in a tub full of hot bubbling water.

Precisely.

And then ask yourself how long young and randy’s bodily excretions might possibly live in warm water.

I rest my case.

I’m now off to rescue my phone from the flower bed…

Despite living in Wilmington, Delaware for over a decade, Moira had never understood the point of Thanksgiving. She was a proud Scot by birth and she came from a long line of proud Scots. Not that she was unfriendly or anti-social, her knitting circle and reading group were always well attended and her role as librarian was highly respected.
She had moved to the US from Linwood in Renfrewshire when her husband died. Her only daughter being, at that time, herself a widowed single-mother living in Wilmington.
For a few years, Moira had spent Thanksgiving with her daughter and grandchildren, always a bit bemused at having another major family festival so near to the one she saw as more traditional – a secular Christmas. But, when in Rome, she told herself.

Then three years previously her daughter had remarried to another man in the armed forces and was off to live where he was based in California. Moira looked at the climate charts and decided that she was most decidedly not going to move to anywhere like that. She liked the climate in Wilmington, it made her think of her childhood home.
So for the last two years Moira had not celebrated Thanksgiving and had been happy to stay at home for the holiday, Skype with the grandchildren and catch up with her reading. This year, however, it was not proving so simple. Anna, who attended both Moira’s knitting circle and her reading group, started asking about what she would be doing for Thanksgiving.
“Oh, it’s not my festival is it?” Moira said, and gave a short laugh. “It’s for you who had ancestors here in sixteen hundred and frozen to death. The ones who had a big party with some local inhabitants who saved your ancestors, helped them survive and then came to celebrate. Or something like that. Nothing to do with me, really. I’m Scottish.’
Anna had put down her knitting, a sharply orange and cream acrylic and wool mix which she was turning into a bolero, and stared in disbelief.
“Now where do you get that from? My ancestors didn’t move to the United States until early last century. In fact, if only the descendants of those who were at the original Thanksgiving ever celebrated it then I would think it had died out as a custom long since.”
Moira’s lips twitched into a tight line.
“You have been brought up with it, Anna. You were born American.”
The other woman stared a little.
“Part of Thanksgiving is celebrating a welcome to those from other cultures. Even Scots!” she added the last tartly.
“It is a classic family festival,” Moira said, “and my family is in California, not Delaware.”
Anna looked as though she was going to argue but instead gave a small sigh and returned to her knitting.

Thanksgiving came and Moira had enjoyed a brief Skype with her family and was just wondering what to eat when the doorbell rang. A little irritated as today was not a day she had planned for visitors and so her usually immaculate bun was replaced by a cascade of unruly wavy hair, Moira answered the door.
Outside stood Anna, her husband their children and the grandparents. All of them burdened by savoury-smelling boxes or bags. Moira opened her mouth to speak and Anna gently grasped her arm and led her back inside her house. As Anna’s family unpacked the beautifully cooked, Thanksgiving meal with all the trimmings, Anna hugged Moira.
“The local inhabitants have come to save you and celebrate,” she said, “and we are not taking no for an answer.”
It was the best kind of Thanksgiving for all of them – but for Moira the first of many more.

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Writing inspired by the art of Ian Bristow

They said she was too young. Too inexperienced. That she was an untried Wiccan who would never succeed in such an endeavour. But they underestimated her determination to carry on her beloved grandmother’s work. 

A single tear ran down her face as she picked up grandmother’s wand and stroked it lovingly. She closed her eyes and drew the necessary serenity about her.

Lifting the wand to her face she opened her eyes and blew gently.

The air about her filled with the delicate beauty of hope, joy, laughter and happiness. The bubbles flew gently away, bearing dreams for sleeping children.

Jane Jago

Ian is an awesome artist and cover designer, you can find his work at Bristow Design.

Songs from a Tone-Deaf Minstrel, poems from love songs to limericks by Jane Jago

Do you find life both amusing and frustrating? Are you an oddly-shaped peg in a regular hole? Do you march to the tune of your own band?
If any of this is familiar the poetry of a tone-deaf minstrel may be right up your crooked alley.

Ghost 
Creature of mist
Dances with night
Flirting with death
Flees from the light
Cries in the wind
Sings to the grave
When morning arrives
Dies like a knave

The poems take a somewhat skew-whiff look at life through the eyes of a person who doesn’t take herself too seriously, though not all is humorous.

So pop along and have a look 
Within the covers of the book 
And if you like the things you see 
Chuck a couple of quid at me 
And that is all I have to say 
Support a sad old bat today!

Songs from a Tone-Deaf Minstrel is out today. Just in time to pop in the Christmas stocking of someone you love. Or someone you dislike?

Jacintha Farquhar, maternal parent of Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV offers important life lessons to those who like to think they’ve got what it takes to write a damn book…

Yes, it’s me, Jacintha Farquar, the unfortunate mother of the abominable Moons – that’s Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV to officialdom and ‘IVy’ to those fools who think him capable of stepping out of his self-centered and self-satisfied little world long enough to offer them some tenuous parody of friendship.
Well as always I have to go around behind him like the proverbial pooper-scooper cleaning up the mess he makes and, specifically, I have been asked to contribute to this blog to try and remedy some of the dreadful drivel he spewed here in the past about how to write.
He has no fucking clue – seriously!
Go read his book if you don’t believe me, no not that god-awful supposed sci-fi thing ‘Fatswhistle and Bucktooth’, I mean the laughably titled How to Start Writing a Book . I did my best to try with that too, but you’ll see if you take a look at it.
Anyway, back to the task in hand and one thing I see many of you writers struggling with is people having social intercourse. No, get your minds out of the gutter the lot of you! That means conversation, discussion, argument – communication between people.

Social Intercourse

In the world of writing you don’t call it that of course, probably because the schoolboy giggles would get the better of you and then you’d not write a bloody word for the next week. You lot call it ‘dialogue’.
Do I really need to take you back to school, sit you down and explain simple things like where to put commas in dialogue and the difference between a speech/dialogue tag and an action tag? I hope not, but if you need that then stop trying to pretend you are writing a book and go and look them up so you have the faintest notion of what I’m on about.
Let’s assume you are over the baby gate and romping along at least at school pupil level here.

First thing to remember is to avoid ‘talking head’ syndrome when the reader has no idea of where/how the conversation is taking place. Begin by setting the scene, tell us where the chat is happening and who is present:

Mary and Tom sat down for dinner at their dining room table with their daughter Ella and her new boyfriend Paul.

Next important point ‘said’ is good. Consider:

“This tastes lovely,” Tom exclaimed.
“Thank you, dear,” murmured Mary.
Ella tapped her plate with her fork. “Well done, Mum,” she cheered.
“What is in the pie?” Paul wondered.

You get the point. Of course you wouldn’t just put in ‘said’ for all those which brings us to the third point, use action to indicate who is talking where you can:

Tom smiled across at his wife. “This tastes lovely.”.
“Thank you, dear.” Mary blushed, she had been working on the meal all day in honour of this special occasion.
Tapping her plate with her fork, Ella drew everyone’s attention. “Well done, Mum.” She lifted her glass in a toast.
But Paul didn’t seem to notice, he was poking at the food on his plate. “What is in the pie?”

Hardly brilliant prose, but you can see how it brings the conversation to life.

Next point, try to keep your conversation appearing real. Now that means you leave out all the repetitions and ‘um-ing’ and ‘er-ing’ that we all do in natural speech, but it also means you don’t have your characters declaiming speeches full of posh words at each other either. If you have a character who does that they will seem like a pompous twat to your reader!

Oh yes, one more thing. Don’t do this, it drives me bloody potty, like scraping a fork over a plate:

After the happy couple had left Mary and Tom cuddled up together on the sofa.
“Oh Tom, do you think they will be as happy as we are?”
“I’m sure they will, Mary, they seem made for each other.”
Mary sighed and looked thoughtful.
“Well, Tom, I am not so sure of that as you seem to be.”
“What do you mean, Mary?”

People do not use each other’s names all the time in conversation when it is obvious who they are talking to.  Do. Not. Do. It.

Alright, that’s your bloody lot. I’m not paid by the word for this you know, so bugger off the lot of you and let me get back to Netflix and pernod – one of my favourite cocktails…

Jacintha Farquar, unlucky to be mother of Moonbeam Farquhar Metheringham IV.

As mentioned above you can find more of my son’s ramblings in How To Start Writing A Book courtesy of E.M. Swift-Hook and Jane Jago, but if you do have a bloody stiff drink before you read it!

The streets are a-dancing in autumn’s lost gown
A scatter of leaves that sprinkled the town
Blown with the crisp packets to catch on a hedge
Swept with the dogends under each ledge.
Played with by the children, in drifts in the park
Lifted by blustery winds for a lark
Packed by the tramp of feet, wet from the rain
Swirled down the gutters and blocking the drain.
Golden and orange and yellow and brown
Streets filled with the beauty of autumn’s lost gown.

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Dying to be Roman by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook is a whodunit set in an alternative modern day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules.

Another tap came on the door and a sentry stuck his head in.
“Bryn Cartivel, dominus.”
“Who?”
“My decanus,” Dai provided.
“Send him in then.”
Bryn came in looking, Julia thought, a bit nervous. Dai obviously agreed with her because he barked out a laugh, which he covered quickly.
“What is it?” Decimus shot a disapproving frown at Dai as he asked the question, but from the way the decanus’s face froze and he straightened up, Julia realised Bryn thought the frown was aimed at himself.
“It’s them toughs we apprehended, dominus. We’ve been talking to them nicely and they decided to come clean, in the interests of furthering justice, you understand. But I don’t really want to repeat what they said.”
Decimus looked at the decanus and then smiled – the one Julia recognised as his nice smile, the one without wolffish overtones.
“I don’t shoot messengers,” he said mildly.
Bryn took a run at it. 
“It’s all very well to say that, but I never expected to ever be in the same room as you even, dominus. And now I am, I have to tell you that the street toughs who attacked my boss and domina Julia were paid by your lady wife and another woman. A veiled woman with two of them little pompom dogs.”
At which point Julia got up and stomped around the room kicking furniture.
“I’m guessing that those two women didn’t want us investigating the murders.”
“No domina,” Bryn was polite, “it doesn’t seem like they did. According to the vigiles we are also talking nicely to, they expected Titillicus to be in charge of the case. And they had him precisely where they wanted him.”
“They did. Thank you, Bryn,” Dai spoke softly.
Instead of subsiding, Bryn stuck out his chin.
“That’s not all. Them Vigiles reckon that the woman with the dogs paid a couple of junior investigators to pass on details of which Game players were in trouble with the big betting syndicate in Rome.”
Dai swore and he met Julia’s fulminating eye with some embarrassment.
“Now I feel responsible too. I’ve been blaming it all on Rome, but now…”
Julia decided not to belabour the point, just shrugging eloquently.
“This smells very bad. We should all be very careful.”
Decimus rang the bell at his elbow and when the sentry poked his head around the door frame he spoke briskly.
“I think we will double the guard for a while.”
The sentry saluted and could be heard outside relaying the order. Decimus turned to Bryn.
“Thank you, decanus. I would prefer it if you and your men remained here until we smoke out the last of the rats. I hope that isn’t a trouble to you.”
Bryn’s face and voice were wooden.
“No sir. Thank you, sir.”
He saluted awkwardly, as if he had not had much practice at making the gesture, and backed out of the room.
Julia looked at Dai to see him battling some powerful emotion. He managed to keep a straight face for a few seconds then started to laugh.
“I’m sorry,” he gasped, “but Bryn has been my decanus since I was promoted, and I’ve never managed to get the better of him. Not once. It’s probably petty, and entirely out of place in a murder investigation, but I did so enjoy watching him squirm.”
Decimus actually forgot his woes sufficiently to snort out a laugh. Julia looked at the pair of them with at least an attempt at proper Roman dignity and gravitas.
“Behave, you two.”
Dai went so far as to poke his tongue out at her, so she gave up trying to bring them to a sense of decency and went to look out of the window into the parade ground. That proved too much for her hard-won composure as Bryn was standing in the middle of Dai’s posse, waving his arms and mugging frantically as he related what had transpired in the Tribune’s office.

Part XXI will be here next week. If you can’t wait to find what happens next you can snag the full novella here.