In the dark days that follow the Roman devastation of Jerusalem in AD 70, nineteen-year-old Shelamzion bat Judah finds herself captured and awaiting both her own execution and that of her husband, former rebel-leader Simon bar Gioras. Alone and forgotten, there seems little reason to go on living, yet a strange friendship begins to grow between Shelamzion and her austere, old Roman jailor, Fabius Cornelius Grammaticus.

With his pretensions to be recognized as an historian in the style of Livy, it is to her he turns to record the true version of events behind the insurrection in Judea that led to the destruction of her country. Time is running out, however, and unknowingly history is being rewritten by a traitor’s hand.