Blood & Empire: 2

Rome cast them out. The desert swallowed the Eagles at Carrhae, and the legionaries who survived became slaves, then mercenaries, then ghosts of an empire that will never send for them. At the edge of the known world, deep in the steppe beyond the Silk Road, Tribune Rufinius and the remnants of his cohort have carved out something like a home - in the service of Zhizhi, self-styled Chanyu of all Xiongnu, a warlord whose ambition is matched only by his cruelty.But loyalty bought with steel is loyalty on loan. Zhizhi's own brother, Huhanye, has thrown in his lot with the golden throne of Han and claimed as his bride the most celebrated beauty in the Forbidden City - Wang Zhaojun, a concubine whose portrait has become an empire's obsession, and whose heart is not as settled as her marriage. As the rival Chanyus circle one another and Chin sharpens its spears for a reckoning generations in the making, Rufinius is drawn into a game of empires spanning four peoples and a thousand li of frozen plain.At his side is Lucia - once a slave, now his wife, and the one thing left he cannot afford to lose. Between them and survival stand duels fought bare-chested on the ice, a harem seething with poison and ambition, old blood debts, and a Roman discipline that may yet save this broken legion - or be the death of every man in it.Grounded in one of history's most tantalizing mysteries - the lost legion of Carrhae, and the Chinese chronicles that may have glimpsed them one last time - Blood & Empire is a sweeping, sensual, brutal journey through the ancient world's collision of empires. For readers of Conn Iggulden and Robert Harris, this is historical fiction at full gallop: love and war, loyalty and betrayal, fought at the edge of a gladius.