Taliesin

A girl vaults the horns of a bull in front of a crowd, in a kingdom with very little time left. Charis is a princess of Atlantis and one of its bull dancers, and the earthquakes have already started. In the other half of the book, on the coast of Britain, Prince Elphin pulls a sealskin bundle out of a salmon weir, finds a living infant inside it, and names him Taliesin. Rome is pulling out. The raiders are not.

Lawhead runs the two lives in alternating strands and refuses to hurry them together. Taliesin grows up a bard under the druid Hafgan, in a Britain of small kings and thinning Roman order. Charis survives the destruction of her country and comes ashore in the west with the remnant of the Atlantean court, foreigners with better manners and no home. The strands cross late, and cross over the Atlanteans' contempt for the natives they are now living among. The two marry, Merlin is born, and Taliesin does not live to raise him.

This is the ground floor of a long Arthurian cycle. Arthur is books away, and anyone here for him spends the whole book getting only as far as Merlin's birth. The bull-dancing sequences invite comparison with Mary Renault and lose it. What the book has instead is patience: it will spend an entire childhood establishing why a British bard and an exiled Atlantean would produce the one person the rest of the cycle depends on.