The Farrier's Blight Ledger
Case Notes from a Dying Valley

About this book:

In the plague-shadowed spring of 1347, farrier Tobias Finch records more than shoeing accounts in his hide-bound ledger. When a mare drops a foal with horn for skin, yellow eyes, and blood like ditch-water, it is only the first entry in a reckoning that spreads from the low marshes to the lord’s high stables. Hooves rot to suet on living beasts. Lambs are born blind, their sockets smoothed over with pale plate. Men who handle the fodder find their fingers turning grey and cold. The bailiff demands answers; the priest hides in the abbey; and the valley’s only healer is a man who knows iron better than prayer—but even his fleam cannot cut the root of this blight.

Tobias tends the valley’s beasts because no physician will soil their boots for a tenant’s wage. He knows the smell of thrush, the look of staggers, the cure for a colic’d ox. But this affliction obeys no humoral logic: it drinks the heat from flesh, turns seed to black horn, and moves on the wind like a judgment. From the tithe-barn’s bitter hay to the sulfur trenches the lord’s men dig in panic, Tobias tracks the contagion through splintered hooves and grey milk, forced to choose between the bailiff’s tally and the lives of those who cannot pay his fee.

*The Farrier’s Blight Ledger* is a masterwork of historical dread—visceral, precise, and steeped in the mud and smoke of the fourteenth century. Written as the case notes of a man who reads sickness in a frog’s texture and death in a mare’s breath, it blends forensic mystery with folk horror, where the boundary between natural disease and something older, seeded in the dark soil, erodes with every entry. For readers of *The Name of the Rose*, *Year of Wonders*, and *The Mercies*: a ledger of the dying, kept by the only hand steady enough to write it.