A Time of Witches

In present-day Savannah, Georgia, twenty-six-year-old Lilith Legare is plagued by a recurring nightmare in which she burns alive at the stake. Three months after her mother's death from cancer, strange phenomena have intensified around her: animals follow her adoringly, plants stretch toward her touch, and the weather shifts with her emotions. A honeysuckle vine her mother once hacked to the roots has regrown overnight. Lilith works part-time at a local bookstore and drifts through life without purpose, living off her parents' life insurance.

Her best friend Essie, a lawyer and mother to Lilith's goddaughter Amara, urges Lilith to explore the supernatural experiences she has suppressed since childhood, arguing that her mother forbade magic out of jealousy rather than protection. Driven by a storm that physically pushes her toward the door, Lilith enters a fortune teller's shop called Enchanted, where a mysterious woman identifies her exceptional power and warns that Lilith must help a woman named Sybil from her dream or cease to exist. When Lilith calls the next day, the owner says no one matching the woman's description works there.

The novel alternates with a parallel storyline set in July 1645 at Brackenmere Manor in Bury St. Edmunds, England. Sybil Brantham, an educated and wealthy widow, inherited knowledge of herbal healing from her mother, a "daughter of the earth," a woman gifted with the ability to draw on nature's energy. Sybil's late husband Henry converted a priest hole, a secret chamber built to shelter persecuted clergy, beneath the library hearth to store her mother's grimoire, a book of inherited herbal and magical knowledge. Sybil watches over Jacinda, her sixteen-year-old "sister," whose extraordinary and volatile powers she suppresses with an iron bracelet, knowing that any display of such abilities during the escalating witch hunts could prove fatal.

Sybil's situation grows dire when Magistrate Robert Walsingham, who has repeatedly demanded she marry him and once assaulted her, confronts her again. Meanwhile, Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General whose witch hunts have already killed women in nearby towns, is heading toward Bury St. Edmunds. Sybil meets with her fellow daughters of the earth, Kat, a seamstress and mother of seven, and Edith, an older woman who tends to the poor. They perform a protection charm, but their efforts prove insufficient.

In Savannah, Lilith searches her mother's belongings and finds an ancestry journal revealing her mother's jealousy of Lilith's supernatural gifts. Tracing the family lineage, she discovers the entry: "Sybil Brantham. Burned as a witch." She contacts Brackenmere Manor and flies to England, where she meets Asher, a guarded veterinarian who serves as the property's caretaker, and his elderly Aunt Jacqueline, who hosts the attached bed and breakfast.

At the decaying manor, Lilith sees translucent ghostly figures and briefly glimpses the house in its original state. A young woman with red-gold hair appears, the same figure from her nightmares. Lilith's crescent-moon birthmark blazes and she faints. In 1645, the magistrate arrests Sybil for witchcraft and petty treason, the charge of using magic to kill her husband, which carries the sentence of burning alive. A poppet, a small cloth doll planted as fabricated evidence, serves as the basis for the accusation. Iron manacles sever Sybil's connection to the earth's power.

Sybil endures imprisonment alongside Edith and dozens of other accused. Hopkins subjects her to starvation, forced walking without sleep, and a body search in which examiners use a trick needle to fake evidence of a witch's mark. Edith is bound and thrown into the River Lark in a swimming test; she drowns and is declared innocent posthumously. Kat is arrested separately but released when her husband petitions Hopkins.

Lilith uses a key from Aunt Jacqueline to enter the manor alone. Jacinda's apparition can see and speak to Lilith and asks her to search for a secret Sybil has been hiding. Lilith discovers an iron lever behind a bookshelf that opens a hidden passage, revealing a room filled with dried herbs, crystals, and the grimoire, which glows at her touch. At Moyse's Hall museum in Bury St. Edmunds, she confirms the execution date: August 27, 1645, and realizes she has only three days.

Lilith begins performing charms from the grimoire. Dragon, a neglected black cat Asher brings home from his veterinary practice, bonds with Lilith and leads her to a honeysuckle clearing, where she performs a self-acceptance charm and for the first time embraces her power. Back at the manor, she witnesses the repeating historical day and sees Anne, Sybil's maid, meeting the magistrate in secret. Anne is pregnant with his child, and he has refused to help her unless she fabricates the poppet and signs a false confession against Sybil. Lilith also discovers that the magistrate's surname, Walsingham, is the same as Asher's.

In the grimoire, Lilith finds a letter from Jacinda confessing she performed a forbidden linking spell that tied Sybil's fate to a future descendant born under a full moon. The spell explains Lilith's nightmares, her birthmark, and her draw to the manor. If Sybil dies, Jacinda will not survive the year and the entire lineage, including Lilith, will be erased. A hidden entry in Sybil's hand reveals that Jacinda is not her sister but her daughter, fathered by John Griffin, a vicar Sybil loved in her youth.

Lilith's erasure accelerates. Photos vanish from her phone, and Essie no longer recognizes Lilith's number by the next morning (256). Aunt Jacqueline reveals she is also a daughter of the earth, descended from the magistrate's line, and has prepared her entire life for this moment. In the honeysuckle clearing, she leads a time-travel enchantment, sacrificing her own connection to the earth permanently. Lilith materializes in 1645, tells Jacinda that Anne is the denouncer, and is shoved back through time.

On August 27, 1645, eighteen condemned prisoners are hanged on Thingoe Hill. Sybil is bound to the stake. Before the execution, the magistrate removes her iron shackles to prevent them from melting, and the earth's power floods back into her. Sybil channels it into an enchantment promising that the earth will return to Hopkins and Walsingham the suffering they have inflicted on others. Kat then arrives with Anne, who publicly confesses she fabricated the evidence under coercion. Kat rallies the crowd by recounting Sybil's years of selfless healing. The crowd turns against the magistrate, who flings the torch onto the pyre in rage and flees. John Griffin fights through the fire, cuts Sybil free, and carries her to safety.

In the present, Lilith returns nearly invisible. Asher and Aunt Jacqueline no longer recognize her, and her belongings have vanished. She retreats to the clearing with Dragon, her last connection to the world. When Dragon, too, walks away, Lilith believes she has been erased. Moments later, his ears perk up. He turns, sees her, and races back. Jacinda succeeded. Lilith is fully visible again, and Asher finds her remembering everything. They share their first kiss.

In an epilogue, Hopkins dies in Manningtree and Walsingham dies in his prison cell in 1647, Sybil's enchantment fulfilled. Sybil, married to John, has emigrated to Maryland with Jacinda. One year later, Lilith has sold her Savannah home, restored Brackenmere Manor, and settled in England. When Essie visits with Amara, the girl wanders into the honeysuckle clearing and the vine stretches toward her hand. Lilith realizes that Jacinda's parting gift, the power to choose who carries on the legacy, means she need not pass it to her own child. She sees Amara as the potential next daughter of the earth. That night, Lilith dreams of Sybil, who mouths "Thank you" across the centuries.