| Synopsis: |
>A MEDIEVAL MYSTERY< MARIANA IN SCOTLAND Lady Marian MacElpin (known in Spain as Dona Mariana de la Manga), now twenty-four, and still fighting the label "witch" that has haunted her since childhood, travels for the first time to the land of her ancestors. There, in the far north of Scotland, called upon by chance to act as interpreter for two Arabic-speaking slaves whose master has been murdered, she meets her Scottish grandmother (a witch, of course) whom she had long believed dead; she becomes embroiled in ancient myths and legends (sheltimen, mermaids, elps, the Queen of Elphame) - which prove no less fantastic now, in the flesh, than they had seemed in the tales her father told her when she was a child; and she falls (yet again) into the unsympathetic hands of authority, this time in the form of the local Master Executioner and his obnoxious son, and the skeletal black-robed Dominican Friar, Brother Arsenius, Inquisitor ! |