As Sure as the Dawn

As Sure as the Dawn is a historical novel by the American writer Francine Rivers, published in 1995 by Tyndale House. It is the third book of the Mark of the Lion series, after A Voice in the Wind and An Echo in the Darkness.

The series is set in the Roman Empire in the first century, and the first two books follow Hadassah, a Jewish Christian taken to Rome as a slave. This final volume belongs to Atretes, a German captured as a child and made a gladiator, who has bought his freedom and now wants to return to the land and the tribe he was taken from. He travels with Rizpah, a young widow and a Christian, and her son, and the novel follows the three of them north across the empire into the Germanic territories, where Atretes finds that the home he remembers is not the home that exists. Rivers writes for a Christian readership and keeps the faith of the characters at the centre of the plot, and the Roman world of the earlier books is carried into the frontier provinces.

Rivers had written the first two books in the early 1990s, and the series as a whole became one of the best known works of Christian historical fiction.