Healer. Harlot. Heretic. Magdalena Overmorrow is a scholar, a healer, a notorious harlot – and, in secret, the magician that the women of Astoleyn go to when they need illegal abortions. When she is betrayed and arrested, Magda is banished to the realm's northernmost city to be watched over until her trial by the Lord Proctor of Cair Gramora, a man so pious and humorless it is rumored that he has never once laughed in his life.? But when she arrives in Gramora, Magda is surprised to find that the Lord Proctor isn't the grizzled old priest she expected but a man barely older than she is, and as cold and mysterious as the mountains at the cair's northern border. One word from him could send her back to prison and almost certainly to death at the stake, but despite herself she is intrigued by him – and the secrets she can tell he is keeping. All Magda has to do is stay alive and out of trouble long enough to earn a pardon, but as she is drawn deeper into the intrigue of the cair, she and the Lord Proctor form an uneasy alliance that could either save her life or lead her to martyrdom and ruin.
