The Devil's Ledger

Scotland, 1590. A storm all but drowns the king on his way home with his bride, and the whisper runs that witches raised it. In the low country of Lothian the fires begin, and the innocent burn by the score.

Elspeth Craw, an aging healer who can feel the true craft living in another soul, is forced to serve the hunt as a searcher of the accused; and she alone knows the terrible thing beneath it. Not one of the burned is a witch. The whole slaughter is a working, and a real hand steers it, paying a monstrous debt in the only coin it takes, which is life.

To speak the truth is impossible, for it is the very name the whole court already screams. To end it will cost her the one thing she has hidden all her life.

Around her the record runs as it truly ran: the wreck of the queen's crossing, the king who made himself an expert in the craft, the wise wife of Keith brought to Holyrood to answer for the weather, and the trials that taught a kingdom how to burn its own. THE DEVIL'S LEDGER follows the North Berwick witch trials as closely as the record allows, and asks what was really being paid for, and by whom.

A standalone novel of the Falcon's Binding, in which the magic runs just beneath the documented history.