The Warden He Betrayed

Muirne has pulled three hundred bodies out of the Sallow Reach. The last one had its tongue sewn shut. The crown calls it a body-thief's problem and hands her to the Warden — Halloran, the man who flooded her village when she was nine. He doesn't know her. He wants a diver, not a reckoning, and the reward he offers is finally enough to buy her way out of the drowned streets. So she takes his coin, descends with him into the dark water, and learns what the mage-houses are selling and to whom. But every dive brings him closer to her face, and she was nine when he sank the Reach. Some rags can be traded for a name. Some debts cannot be paid by the man who owes them.