Who can withstand the encroaching forces of destruction and enslavement? The Freemen can - they have been through it before. More than a thousand years ago they were nearly wiped out, their lands taken, their stories and customs driven underground. Secretly they endured - as did their spirit of defiance. Now, as America falls into tyranny, they may be freedom's last hope. When young widow and mother Erin Gordon is deemed an enemy of the state, everyone she knows turns against her. Desperate to feed her child, she seeks out her rustic-seeming neighbors, and quickly discovers there is much more to them than meets the eye. With their help - and under the protection of a daunting, enigmatic man called Harm - she must evade authorities in order to keep her child; along the way, she encounters a rugged, clear-sighted people who refuse to forsake their old ways, their loyalty to blood and soil, and the birthright of their independence.