Episode 7.1.a
>Countryside Southwest of Londinium, Britannia, September 81 CE<
You are standing in a field, and a moment ago you were not. The sky has no sun in it, only a flat grey running all the way to the horizon, and the air is cold enough to feel in your teeth. Wind moves across the grass in long slow waves. Italy is a great distance behind you now, and so is that night of fire and ash under the mountain. Many days have gone by since then. This is another country under another sky, and even the light is a different colour.
One thing here you know. There is a tree a few paces off, and it is the same tree. No boy in the branches this time.
A man is high up in it, pressed close against the trunk, neither young nor old, in a tunic worn past mending and not washed in longer than that. Everything in the way he holds himself says he would like to be elsewhere and cannot get there. When he sees you looking, he goes still with fear.
"Quiet." It comes out as a hard whisper. "Be quiet. Can you stand further off? I am hiding here, and they are watching for me, and I have nothing to say to you. Go away."
There is anger in the whisper, but he does not dare raise his voice.
Your Recentius sees something at the man's throat. Not gold. Iron: a band closed around his neck, thick and heavy, with the look of a thing a smith fits once and never takes off again. Free men do not wear iron at the throat.
Prompt: Using your knowledge of the institution of slavery, figure out who the man is and what he is doing there. Then try to discover the location of Sinistrus and of any possible Milites Lapidis contacts.
