The Salt and the Veil

Sera Thornveil learned long ago that flinching is a luxury the sea does not extend. Once heir to a fractured coastal dynasty, she now hauls rope on the Gull's Hollow docks, exiled, unnamed, and certain she has buried her past beneath brine and backbreaking labor. That certainty shatters the morning a dying courier from the Veiled Reach staggers into port and presses a sealed letter into her palm, bleeding secrets her dead mother swore would never surface. The Thornveil name, it seems, is not finished with her, or with her sister Mira, who still stands inside the halls that cast them both out. A Tyrant Admiral's iron fleet prowls the coast, hunting anyone who carries the old bloodlines. The drowned sing from the tide. Wraiths of lords who died unrepentant walk the inlets at dusk. And somewhere in the Veiled Reach, a truth waits that could restore Sera's house or burn what little family she has left to ash. Forced back aboard a smuggler's deck with a loyal crew, a stubborn innkeeper's grudges, and a tide of visions she cannot silence, she has one choice: outrun the fleet, unravel the letter, and reach Mira before the Admiral's herald does, or watch her sister become the next name the sea forgets.