THE WITCH OF BALINTORE

A MEDIEVAL MYSTERY
MARIANA IN SCOTLAND
Lady Marian MacElpin (known in Spain as Doña
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