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 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.
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
First published in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, 1954
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