The Eagle

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The Eagle Page 28

by Rosemary Sutcliff


  The moth was circling wildly nearer and nearer to one of the lamps which stood directly before the Finance Minister, its blurred shadow flashing about the table as it swooped and spun in dizzy spirals about the bright and beckoning flame, closer and closer, until the wild, ecstatic dance ended in a burst of shadows, and the moth spun away on singed wings, to fall with a pitiful, maimed fluttering close beside Allectus’s wine-cup. And Allectus, smiling faintly, crushed out its life under one deliberate finger.

  That was all. Anybody would crush a singed moth—it was the obvious, the only thing to do. But Justin had seen the pale man’s face as he watched the dancing moth, waiting for it to dance too near, seen it in the unguarded instant as he stretched out the precise forefinger to kill.

  By Rosemary Sutcliff

  The Shining Company

  Tristan and Iseult

  Warrior Scarlet

  Outcast

  Sword Song

  The Roman Britain Trilogy

  The Eagle of the Ninth

  The Silver Branch

  The Lantern Bearers

  An Imprint of Macmillan

  THE EAGLE OF THE NINTH. Copyright © 1954 by Rosemary Sutcliff.

  All rights reserved. For information, address Square Fish, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Square Fish and the Square Fish logo are trademarks of Macmillan and are used by Farrar Straus Giroux under license from Macmillan.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sutcliff, Rosemary.

  The eagle of the Ninth / by Rosemary Sutcliff.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-312-64429-1

  1. Great Britain—History—Roman period, 55 B.C.–A.D. 449—Juvenile fiction.

  [1. Great Britain—History—Roman period, 55 B.C.–A.D. 449—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S966Eag 1993

  [Fic]—dc20 93-7952

  First published in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, 1954

  Square Fish logo designed by Filomena Tuosto

  www.squarefishbooks.com

 

 

 


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