The Drowned Bell

Every ten years, the drowned bell tolls a name - and the sea comes to collect the soul it calls.

For four hundred years, the tide-locked island of Saltmere has kept a bargain with the deep: one drowned soul, once a decade, to hold the water back.

Maren Kell has never heard of the island, or of the great-aunt who leaves it to her - until a letter draws her north to a cold black house above the flats and a duty she never asked for: Warden of Saltmere. She is a bell-founder, a mender of cracked and voiceless bells. And she is the first Warden in four centuries who might unmake the drowned bell and end the bargain for good.

But the sea has been waiting for her. It knows her true name. It sings to her in her dead mother's voice. And it sends its Herald - Cael, the beautiful, half-drowned young man it made from a village boy it stole ten years ago - to see the debt paid.

To break the covenant, Maren must go down into the black water at the lowest tide, with everything to lose - and trust the one soul sent to destroy her.

She came to end a four-hundred-year curse. She never meant to fall for the sea's own Herald.

The sea never lies. That is the danger.
A lyrical, haunting gothic fantasy of inheritance, sacrifice, and a slow-burn love that runs against the tide.