Chapter 1

I was waist-deep in black water when Regent Maud told me to clear the Bell.

The flooded cathedral smelled of rot, salt, and old prayer. Broken columns rose from the drowned nave like ribs. Low-tide light came through the collapsed roof in thin gray blades, enough to show the barnacles crusting the bronze. The Sunken Bell hung from a chain thick as a man's waist, its mouth just above the waterline. It had been silent for six years. Everyone in Bellwether knew that. Silent meant safe. Silent meant the Black Tide stayed out past the reef.

My little sister Lottie stood on the stone ledge behind me, clutching her rag doll. She was eight. Her feet were bare. Maud's enforcers had taken her shoes as surety.

"Clear it, Callis," Maud said from the ledge. Her voice carried across the water without effort. "You are six months behind on your debt. The Salt Guild has been generous."

Generous. I looked at the debt token around my neck, then at the barnacled bronze. "The clapper's fused," I said. "You can see it from here. I can't clear what won't move."

"You can scrape. You can pray. You can drown." Maud's sealskin gloves creaked as she folded her hands. "The tithe requires effort."

Lottie said, "Wren?"

"Stay still, minnow," I told her. I used the name our mother had used for me, though it tasted wrong in my mouth. Lottie was the little one. She should have been the minnow. I was the one who swam.

The water bit my thighs. My oilskin coat was patched at both elbows and split at one shoulder. I had a dive knife on my belt and a brass locket around my neck, my mother's, with a gold-filled crack running across its face. Six years ago, Elin Callis had walked into the tide and never come back. I had been ten. Lottie had been two. She did not remember our mother's face except from the portrait inside the locket.

I waded to the Bell. Barnacles cut my palm. I scraped them away with the knife, slow, because the bronze was old and I did not want to cut myself on a curse. The metal felt colder than the water. Colder than it should have.

My fingers brushed the gold-filled crack along the Bell's rim. I stopped.

It matched the crack in my locket. Not similar. Matched. A jagged line, filled with gold, branching at the same angle. My mother had repaired the locket herself, she told me once, with gold from a jeweler's crucible. She had never said why she knew how.

The Bell hummed.

It was not a sound at first. It was a pressure in my teeth. Then the hum deepened, and the water around my waist shivered, and every barnacle on the bronze cracked open at once.

"Wren," Lottie said, sharper.

"Don't move," I said.

The Bell rang.

One note. Deep. Wrong. The water exploded upward in a ring around me. The chain groaned. Dust and old stone fell from the ceiling. Maud stepped back, one hand going to her bell hammer.

The Bell had no clapper. The clapper was fused to the side, a lump of corrosion and bronze. It could not ring. It rang anyway.

Beneath the water, beneath the drowned pews and the rotted choir stalls, something opened.

I saw it through the black surface: a golden eye, vast and slow, its slit pupil turning toward me. The water grew warm. My locket flared hot against my chest, so hot I hissed. The gold crack in the locket glowed. The gold crack in the Bell glowed back.

A voice poured through my bones. It was not loud. It was deeper than hearing.

"Little minnow."

My mother's voice. My mother's pet name. My mother was dead. She had drowned. Maud had told me. The city had told me. The sea had kept her.

"Seal the Bell!" Maud shouted. "Take the child!"

I turned. Enforcers seized Lottie by both arms. She screamed my name. Her rag doll fell into the water and floated, face-up, one button eye staring at the ceiling.

I lunged. The Bell held me. The hum wrapped around my wrist like a chain. I pulled until my shoulder cracked. The bronze would not let go. My palm was stuck to the metal, skin to barnacle to gold-filled crack.

Maud looked down at me from the ledge. For the first time, I saw something behind her controlled smile. Not triumph. Relief. She had been waiting for this.

"Three days until the Black Tide," she said. "The Bell has chosen. The Bell does not choose debtors."

I wanted to tell her the Bell had not chosen me. It had recognized me. But Lottie was screaming, and the golden eye was rising, and the water was climbing my ribs.

The Bell rang again.