The Unburnt Cone

About this book

On the pollen-continent of Vellin, the rains have forgotten the land. Cities carved from cooled resin huddle around the Motherbole—the last world-tree—while the Amber Court strips it for fuel to climate-seal their palaces and dust-sifters starve on dustbread below. Teska Wren, thirty-six, yellow-stained and half-blind, is the lowest of the low: a fume-stupid sifter who can taste a killer sink a day before it opens. When her warning is ignored and her whole gang is swallowed, she is punished with the cruelest duty of all—harvesting the Motherbole's once-a-millennium seed-cones for burning. One cone will not burn. Teska steals it, a sack of dustbread, and walks north toward the frost-line, where old work-songs say a cone can take—if the land is paid. She is hunted. She carries the future in a sack.