The Hollow Vow

In the salt-rotted port city of Marrowfen, Yarrow Vesper survives the only way the harbor's forgotten ever do, by sorting kelp from the tide's leavings behind the Saltwound Apothecary. When Grandmother Pelen begins to fade under a curse no healer can name, Yarrow breaks the one law every child in the city is taught: never speak to the serpent coiled on the apothecary's sign. Something older than the docks, older than the Concord that rules them, answers. Pelen lives. The price is Yarrow himself. Now branded by the Hollow Vow, he can feel the Coil's remnants stirring in the city's bones, and so can the Concord's hunters. Cassian Rooke, a map-maker whose charts mark places the Concord has erased, offers passage out of Marrowfen. Lysanthi Moore, an outcast who throws knives the way other girls curtsy, offers violence. From a reluctant seer called the Glasswell Oracle to the memory of his lost sister Isolde, Yarrow is drawn toward a truth the Concord has spent generations burying: the serpent god was never a monster. It was a covenant. To save his grandmother, Yarrow must either sever the vow clawing through his chest and die as a broken vessel, or embrace the Coil, betray the only family he has left, and become the weapon the world was taught to fear.