The Hollowfern Conspiracy
A bundle of dried silverwort falls from a crooked shelf in Malliver's Sundries and Astrid Beckford hears it from three shops away, the first small rupture in a quiet that has been growing too heavy. Hollowfern is a moor-bordered village where the lanes have begun misbehaving, the river god Vassle answers through stones, and a raven called Quoth keeps watching from the chimney pots. Worst of all, an absent sister named Miren is being mentioned again, in letters, in gossip, in voices only certain people can hear. Astrid's investigation leads her through Old Bram's riddles, the Wellwife's half-truths, and Pell Overholt's careful silences, and into the orbit of Fenna Underhill, Cosmo Quill, Helia Marrowbone, and the entangled Vellum brothers. The deeper she digs into who Miren really was, and what the village agreed to forget, the clearer it becomes that the conspiracy does not belong to a stranger. It belongs to her family, and the longer it stays buried the more it costs the living. Pulling at the thread risks rousing what should have stayed asleep. Refusing to pull risks losing the only sister she has left to a Hollowfern that has already chosen its side. The Tea That Would Not Steep has finished steeping at last.