The collar is off. The whole drowned world knows her name.

They call her the witch of Vael now ? the girl who sang the Salt Court's holy lie backward and lived. Hunted across a sinking coast, Maren shelters among wreckers and runaways, freeing collared throats one raid at a time and learning the word for what she is. Wellmouth. A voice the deep can speak through ? the first in six hundred years.

Then a smuggled scrap of grey wool reaches her: her mother is alive, held at the bottom of Vael's well. The message says come at the dark of the moon. Come singing. It is a trap, and Maren knows it is a trap, and it is her mother ? so she will row into it anyway.

Between her and the well stands Kael Tidewarden: publicly drowned, privately hunting her, bound to her by a forbidden bond neither of them can cut. His mother built him for a single purpose Maren cannot see, and everything ? the leash, the rebellion, the tide itself ? is paying out toward the one door in the world that should never be opened.

Some doors need two voices. One to open. One to answer.

The Drowned Court continues ? enemies-to-lovers, a first kiss worth the wait, and a betrayal that will drown a city. For readers of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros.