Midsummer's Eve, 1648. England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. The struggle reaches to every corner of the kingdom, even the remote Tidelands--the marshy landscape of the south coast. Alinor, a descendant of wise women and crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Instead, she meets James, a young man on the run and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she's leading disaster into the heart of her life.

Map on endpapers.