The feeble heat barely warmed her fingers numbed by the icy wind whistling through the tiny arrow slit high in one wall, her only source of daylight. At home in Northumberland, her father would be overseeing the spring planting on the family’s estate. Did Sir Guy Cavendish have any inkling that his eldest daughter was not safely in the little house of prayer she had established near the Scottish border? Instead, Tonia shivered inside a dark prison, high in the mountains that ran like a bony spine down England’s length. Was it a week ago that she had been brought to this ruined ancient fortress, or ten days? Time seemed to have stood still since the moment she and her band of pious young women had been torn from their prayers, taken by night to York, and tried for the crime of treason against the crown. Tonia would have considered the charges to be ludicrous except for the fact that her stern judges had sentenced her to death. She had been given no chance to defend herself, or to call upon her family for aid.
