The Weight of Amber

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, accusations that follow a suspicious pattern Ailis alone can detect, 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.

The Weight of Amber is the first book in The Thornfield Inheritance, a multi-generational saga spanning five centuries, following the women of a bloodline that carries a quiet, dangerous gift.