He holds the door. She holds the war. The Court will make them break each other.

Maren has no voice left to sing with — only a slate, a girl who speaks for her, and a throat the drowned dead can pour through at a price she swore she'd never pay twice. They call her the witch of the coast now. Her raids crack open the Court's levy transports one by one, freeing collared singers bound for the tower where the sea-door stands open — the tower where Kael Tidewarden is chained to the note that keeps the world dry, spent by the hour, crowned for it, and three days east of her reach.

The Court his mother rules from her cloister has a new arithmetic: feed throats to the door faster, and call it mercy. And the god beneath the water has a standing offer for Maren — everything she's lost, returned, in her mother's own stolen voice. All it wants is the one thing the world can't survive her giving.

They meet twice. Both times on his tower. The second time breaks them — publicly, brutally, in front of the fleet — and when the Court's terrible working wakes what six centuries of singing kept asleep, a city readers have loved since Book 2 goes under the tide, and the person Maren can least afford to lose goes with it.

Then the evidence surfaces: his betrayal may be the only thing keeping her alive — and the god half-risen instead of risen. She can't believe it. You won't want to.

The saga's darkest hour. Enemies-to-lovers pushed to the breaking point, a sacrifice that will wreck you, and a cliffhanger that detonates into Book 4. For readers of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros.