Life as a Boy Raised by Caesar's Legion

Captured as a boy from a river camp in the Legion of Caesar's westward expansion, Cedar is stripped of his name and raised inside a training camp under Decanus Tavius, shaped year by year into the legionary who will one day be called Marius. Through small tests that escalate into unbearable ones a first kill, a raid gone wrong, the execution of the one friend who never stopped being decent the story tracks exactly how a captured child becomes a true believer, one justified inch at a time, until he is standing over a newly captured boy of his own, doing to a stranger's throat what was once done to his.