The Salt Vow

She crossed a world to get free of the empire. To save her mother, she'll have to cross back - into the one place built to destroy exactly what she is.

Lyra Vessren survived Ashfall. She reached the country beyond the Veil, found the brother the empire buried a lie for, and learned the truth about her own hidden power: she is a keeper, one of a scattered people who can walk onto a battlefield and turn the empire's bonded soldiers back into ordinary, frightened human beings in the space of a breath.

It should feel like safety. It doesn't.

Because her mother is still five hundred miles away in the empire's capital - held in a cell that fills with the tide, kept alive only for the two hundred years of secrets locked behind her closed mouth, and marked for drowning the moment they decide she's empty. And the man who holds her isn't guarding a hostage. He's setting a hook. He knows the one person alive who could reach her is the girl who unmade an Ashmaster and vanished east.

He's not hunting a prisoner. He's hunting Lyra.

To get her mother back, Lyra will have to tear open the Veil, walk into the drowning city, and learn the hardest discipline her strange gift demands: how to spend it without letting it spend her - how to unmake a life and still keep the count of it, because a severer who stops counting stops being a person. She'll do it with a squad who chose her over a wall: a grieving Pyrrhan carrying his lost love in his pocket, a healer chasing a name across two hundred years of the drowned, a silent giant who will break a mountain before he lets anyone touch his own - and Kaelen Draeve, the officer who once carried out the empire's worst orders and is trying, byre by byre and door by door, to become a man who counts the cost instead of exporting it.

But the empire has learned. It has admitted the wall is real. It has admitted her people exist. And it has built something new to answer them - a weapon made from the children it stole, grown and broken and turned, coming back over the Veil with the exact gift that should have made them family.

To stop it, Lyra will have to decide what kind of thing she's willing to become. And whether there's a road through the empire's cruelest trap that doesn't cost her the one thing she swore to keep: her soul, and the count, and the vow her whole line has whispered for two hundred years.

Salt and stone. What you swear over a thing you will not let the sea keep.

THE SALT VOW is the second book in the Ashfall Academy trilogy - a slow-burn fantasy for readers who love:

• A rescue that turns into something far larger, deep in the enemy's heart
• A morally grey love interest earning his way toward the light, one honest day at a time
• A found-family squad tested to its limits and holding
• Buried history, stolen children, and an empire built on a lie starting to crack
• A heroine becoming the thing the empire spent six centuries trying to prevent - and refusing to become the thing it wants

The empire drowns the ones who could cut it free. Lyra keeps them. That's the war.

One-click and cross back over the Veil.