The Still Proof

Ailsa Buchan reads a sickbed the way other people read a face. Her foster-mother taught her the physic and the still both, every herb that heals and every one that kills, and then drowned in the burn a week after she called a poisoned peace-cup a made thing. Ailsa never believed it was a mishap, and she believes it even less when they trade her like a cask to the man the whole North swears butchered a hall of two-and-thirty at that feast, his own father among the dead.

His name is Struan MacRae, the Black Beast of Ardvane. He buried his father and his brother the same night the peace died, and the glens read the son who lived as the son who killed. He will not defend himself the way a guilty man would lie. He tells her only that he did not cut the cup, that he means to prove it before they hang him, and he does not ask her to believe him, which is somehow worse.

Everyone in the North loves the man who really did it. Sir Adam Menteith, the Peaceweaver, who ended the feuds of the glens and feeds the poor and speaks for the King’s own justice, and whose gauger carried the one cup left unbroken. He had a charter drawn to swallow both clans a month before a single drop was poured. Ailsa is the one soul alive who tended the dying and knows that a made cask keeps the maker’s hand, if she can only run it again where the right court will watch. They think she is the girl they let hold the ladle. They have not understood that the surest weapon in this glen was never a blade.

The Still Proof is a standalone dark Highland romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after. For adult readers.