The Bell That Remembered Snow

About this book

For three hundred years the Greatrime held the north, and the Ilvaki herders walked their shaggy thundrels across ice so old it sang. Now the ice is rotting. Twelve-year-old Sarva Kelo can hear it going — a wrong note under the antler-song that nobody in her family will believe until the herd goes through and half of it is lost. With winter grain gone and the bands starving, the Kelo family must borrow from the lowlands, and lowlanders lend only against a child. So Sarva is bonded south to Suldrecht, a crowded city of oak pilings, salt-boilers and bell-founders, built on a coast the sea is quietly reclaiming. Everything there is wrong: the food, the noise, the water that never freezes, the word 'moss-eater' hissed at her in the alleys. But Sarva's strange ear hears something no one in the foundry can — the city's ancient tide-bells are out of tune, and the bronze in them was never city bronze at all. It carries her grandmother's songs, cast into metal by a treaty the city has spent two centuries forgetting. As the spring tide climbs and an ambitious dike-warden moves to melt the old bells for a sea-gate — and to bar the starving herders from the gates — Sarva must decide what she is willing to break, and who she is willing to become. With a gap-toothed foundry apprentice, a sharp-tongued canal runner, and an orphaned thundrel calf beside her, she has one chance to make two peoples hear each other before the water arrives. A middle-grade historical fantasy about a world that will not stop changing, the families we carry and the ones we build, and the difference between surviving a flood and outliving it.