As Edward Plantagenet's armies invade Scotland, Lynx de Warenne, one of the king's most prized warriors, is ordered to secure the royal castle at Dumfries in the crucial borderlands. There he encounters Jock Leslie, the castle's steward, a man with ten children and thirty-one grandchildren, who might have the means of fulfilling Lynx's greatest desire. A thirty-year-old childless widower, Lynx wants more than anything a child who will brighten his life, carry on the de Warenne name, and maintain the family's landholdings. Yet he is a man who is afraid to love and is haunted by the possibility that he is unable to sire a child. When Jock learns of Lynx's desire to become a father, he suggests a handfasting, a Scottish custom whereby a man and a woman can lawfully sleep together for a year and a day, at the end of which time the couple decides either to wed or to part. If the union produces a child, the child is deemed legitimate even if no marriage takes place. When Jock offers Lynx his youngest, most strong-willed daughter, Jane, so desperate is Lynx to mate with a member of the fertile family that he engages Jane in a handfasting - no matter that she is a commoner, no matter that she is terrified of him and attempts to make herself unattractive to him in the extreme, no matter that she is completely inexperienced with men.