When Professor Henner Marcus receives an urgent plea from his niece, Nina Aschauer, he leaves Chicago behind and travels 5,000 miles to France. Nina has finally materialized after a five-year absence, and he is anxious to help her with the trouble she appears to be in. A historian, Nina is irresistibly driven to explore the Pyrenees Mountains for the location of her birth, occurring as her parents fled the Nazis. All she knows is that the name of the place is Valladine, but the name is not found on any map. Her inquiries lead her to an encounter with Alphonse de Sola, a rough-hewn shepherd who offers to take her there. What she finds is love, a medieval outpost arrested in time, and a written codex that thrusts her into the world of Dina Miryan, a medieval Jewish woman. As Henner, Nina, and her best friend, Etoile Assous, decipher the writing, they are irresistibly drawn into the story of this fourteenth-century woman, whose family had fled France following the expulsion in 1306, but who herself had fallen victim to the sexual intrigues of a fiendish priest. The three find themselves embroiled in a world of mystery, adventure, and danger spanning historical bounds.