No Blade, No Crown

Marshgate has forgotten it was ever a gate. Ferran Hillfoot, hedge-witch's apprentice, sells tonics and minds her own business until every child in town turns toward the river in their sleep. Following them, she wakes a bell that has rung unheard for six hundred years — and the bell binds her to the Crown of Nine Reaches, an inheritance split between eight warlords of a drowned kingdom. To break the sleepwalking she must walk the Reach Road and ask each warlord for their fragment. Some give. Some take. One takes her name. And under the reservoir, the drowned king is waiting to give her his — with a curse attached. A sweeping epic of a girl who never wanted a crown, and the age that wakes when she refuses to rule.