Salt and Severance

About this book

In the tide-bound Ambergate Isles, every promise that matters—marriage, debt, guild oath, blood tie—is tied into an enchanted cord called a Binding, and every Binding can be cut, at a price. Verity Marrow cuts them for coin, working the grey edges of a trade the Cordwrights' Guild calls necessary and everyone else calls a curse. When a masked client offers her a fortune to sever a Binding older than the harbor city of Calmouth itself, Verity takes the job without asking why, because asking why has never kept her alive. But the cord she's been hired to cut is wound through the Guild's founding secrets, through the tide-magic that keeps the islands from drowning, and through a family debt she has spent twenty years trying to outrun. As her present investigation pulls her deeper into guild politics, a runaway girl named Tamsin who reminds her too much of herself, and a former partner turned guild enforcer who once loved her, the novel moves back two decades to the marsh village where a younger Verity first learned to tie and break oaths beside her sister Wren—and where a single cut changed both their lives forever. Told in alternating timelines, Salt and Severance follows an unrepentant, morally compromised woman toward a reckoning that will force her to decide whether some bonds are worth keeping broken, and what she owes the dead when the past finally catches the tide.

Book details

Genres:

Literary Fiction, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy

Language:

en

Published:

2026-07-08

Content rating:

R