Where The Panther Kneels

In the shadow of Rome's great arena, a nameless orphan has survived seventeen years of darkness, known only as Corvus, raven-boy, nobody. Raised in the subterranean pens of the Colosseum, he carries nothing of value except a single worn wooden whistle the only object left with him when he was abandoned as an infant at the arena's eastern gate. When a corrupt nobleman frames him for theft and throws him to the most feared beast in the arena, an ancient black panther named Umbra, what happens next shocks fifty thousand witnesses into silence and brings the Emperor of Rome to his feet.
The whistle. The panther's bow. A secret twenty years buried. What follows is the story of a young man discovering who he truly is not only through blood and legal record, but through the fierce, precise love of Aurelia Graccha, a senator's daughter who watched him survive the impossible and decided, quietly and without ceremony, to bear witness to everything that came after. Where the Panther Kneels is an epic romance set against the full splendor and brutality of imperial Rome: a novel about the names we are denied and the ones we earn, about the courage it takes to be entirely oneself, and about the particular alignment of two minds that, once found, cannot be unfound.