The Rooting Song

Cael Maren has heard the marsh sing since she was old enough to kneel in the cold black water. The reeds hum with slow, patient songs that rise from their roots and braid through the mud to the deepest places the floodwater reaches. She has learned to listen the way her grandmother taught her, the way Grandmother Fen did before her, all the way back to names the water still remembers. But the voice that comes from the reed pressed against her cheek is not the song she knows. It is wrong. Thin. Unraveling thread by thread. When Old Tessa warns that the marsh is dying from the root up, Cael learns the silence is no natural thing. Lord Silas Crane has begun buying the drowned lands, flooding the low fields and dragging old songs under with the soil. Pip, the child who should know nothing of the reed-songs, begins humming them in his sleep. Dorian Vetch, who once loved Cael's sister, arrives at the waterline with a sealed letter and a debt no one in the marsh can pay. And at the bottom of the deepest pool, Aldric the Drowned waits for the song that was promised him long, long ago. To save the marsh, Cael must answer every wrong note, every broken root, every drowned promise the water has carried. The price of restoring the song is one she will not see coming, and the choice she makes at the root will decide whether the marsh sings again, or falls silent forever.