She reads the history in everything she touches. He is the most dangerous thing she has ever held.

Scotland, 1593. Ailis Thornfield has a gift she cannot afford to name: when she touches an object, she feels its history. A wedding ring grows heavy with decades of love. A knife burns with the memory of blood. She has survived as an herbalist in the Scottish borderlands by hiding what she can do behind knowledge that looks like intuition and cures that look like luck.

Her mother was not so careful. Her mother burned.

When a series of witch accusations sweep the border villages the English Crown sends a magistrate to investigate. James Blackwood is young, educated, and inconveniently principled. He has been sent to find evidence of ungodly practices. He is finding something else entirely: a woman whose impossible knowledge is the only thing standing between the border villages and a conspiracy designed to destroy them.

She cannot trust the man who holds her life in his legal authority. He cannot trust a woman whose abilities defy everything he was taught at Cambridge. But the conspiracy is real, the witch trials are escalating, and the only way to stop what is coming is to work together — and risk everything on the possibility that the man sent to judge her might be the first person in her life who sees what she is and does not flinch.

Enemies to lovers. Slow burn. 1590s Scotland. No one is safe.