The Tidebound

They did not drown them. They moored them.

Sixteen-year-old Marn Alei harvests salt on a conquered island at the edge of the Saltreach, and she has one secret worth dying for: she can hear the drowned.

They have murmured beneath every day of her life - a crowd behind a door, always talking, never quite loud enough to make out. Her mother gave her a fistful of salt and seven words to keep them quiet, and then walked into the sea and never came back.

Don't answer it.

Then the Empire comes for the Culling. Every islander who turns sixteen must put their hands into a copper basin of deep water and be told the truth of what they are.

Marn's salt runs out. The water says her name.

And Lucen Kessel - the young Weirwright who feels her through the sea like a hand pressed flat against his chest, heir to the man who chains the tide - lies for her.

Hunted, Marn flees into the one place the Empire will never think to look: Cynosure, the great floating capital itself. A city of iron towers and tide-mills, built two generations ago on the deliberate drowning of eleven thousand four hundred and six people.

She is sleeping on their roofs.

And they have waited fifty years for a voice like hers.

But every time Marn uses her gift, Lucen feels it - and the silver chain on his arm sinks a little further into his bone. Every act of magic is an act of exposure and an act of intimacy with the one person who can always find her, and the one person she can never let find her.

As the sea begins to climb an inch a day into the streets of the lower city, Marn is offered three doors. The drowned want vengeance. The Empire wants an instrument. And the boy she cannot afford to love wants her, simply, to stop.

All three of them are reasonable.

All three of them are wrong.

Because in eleven hundred pages of a mass murderer's beautiful handwriting there is a single word that nobody has ever read properly - and saying it out loud will cost Marn Alei everything she has.

They had no hands. They could only ask.