Half-Orphan, Lynn Jamison bled her first this last spring. Now, before her fourteenth winter, the quiet recluse of a milkmaid, faces a fate even worse than being the ever-scolded stepdaughter of Cowherd Plowbent, one of six peasant farmers to scratch a living from Shingle Mill Hollow. For, as Wakesummer Eve brought news of a plague from The New Dead Sea, up through the Midland hamlets, up to the tiny hamlet of Shingle Mill, the news itself was brought by a Plague Didact in his beaked hat. Accompanied by a brutal man-at-arms, the Plague Didact not only brought news of death and new rules to live by—but sought also a wife.

Thence, on Wakesummer Eve, dragged from the cowshed and promised to a man face-unseen behind a sinister mask, Lynn Jamison saw but one course open to her short of taking her own life with her long lost father's hunting knife—to flee by night up Shingle Creek.

First Hymn ~ Masks of Wan Fate

1. Darla’s Bad Cow

2. Lynn’s Weird Hen

3. Mum’s Bent Master

4. Dinner with Fate’s Disaster

Second Hymn ~ Forest of Long Dark

5. Up Shingle Creek

6. The Heather to Seek

7. Plight of a Footloose Keeper

8. Into Dark and Untrue Timber

Third Hymn ~ Mountains of Grim Witness

9. Up a Wicked Rock Slide

10. Up with Big John Hide, Interlude

11. Trucked off the Sly Rider

12. Chucked off the High Divider

Crescendo

13. Ground the Cracked Corn

Wife—, is a couplet novel, to be concluded in Knight.