Ella Mitchell knows the Middle Ages better than almost anyone. As a curator of medieval manuscripts and artifacts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she can recite Old English law codes, identify every motif on the Sutton Hoo helmet, and describe in vivid detail the daily life of a seventh-century Saxon village. But when a freak accident tears her from modern New York and throws her into the real Wessex, her academic-related knowledge shatters against brutal reality. Lost, alone, and dressed in strange clothing, Ella is seized on the lands of a powerful West Saxon lord. Suddenly, the illuminated manuscripts she once studied are replaced by muddy stockades, smoky halls, and men who view women as chattel. While Ella crosses the dangerous currents of the Heptarchy—the seven warring Saxon kingdoms—she finds herself wrapped in a web of passion, power, and risk. Each man she encounters pulls her more deeply into a world of sword and fire, where a blade’s edge separates love and hate. With her twentieth-century heart at war with the savage seventh century all around her, Ella must decide: is she desperate to find a way home, or be the Rose of the Heptarchy?