A Tide of Salt and Severance

In the fog-choked city of Caelmoor, magic is drawn from grief and salt water - and the dead remember everything.Nerys Calloran is the finest saltreader in the city and the one the Coroners’ Guild likes least: low-born, sharp-tongued, and missing four years of her own childhood she has never been able to explain. Her work is grim and holy. She touches the last water that met a dying body and sees the last moment held there. At least the dead tell the truth. So when she reads a drowned noblewoman and finds the impossible-nothing, the memory scoured clean out of the water - Nerys knows what it means, even if it shouldn’t be possible: someone has revived the Hollowing, a forbidden magic that unmakes memory in the living, outlawed for two hundred years on pain of drowning. Cassius Vane, the cold and dangerous Lord Warden of the Veil, needs her to catch the killer hollowing Caelmoor’s nobility. Nerys needs to never see him again. But the investigation forges a tether between them - an old soul-binding that aches when they pull apart and burns hotter the closer they draw - and the deeper Nerys reads, the closer the trail winds to the four years she can’t remember and to a chilling certainty:She wasn’t the killer’s latest victim.She was the first. To stop the murders, Nerys will have to descend through six centuries of drowned city to a shrine no one is meant to find-past a secret that could sink the Court, a love she chose with her eyes open, and a god in the cellar that has been hungry for one particular soul for twenty-three years.