A Tithe of Salt and Bone

The sea takes one soul for every crossing.

In the Shattered Reach, no ship sails the deep without paying the Tithe. Most captains pay with someone else.

Kes Calloway drowned when she was nine. She was dead for four minutes, and she came back hearing the voices of everyone the sea has ever taken. Now seventeen, she dives wrecks for scrap in Port Mercy and does her best not to listen.

Then she pulls a shard of black metal from her mother's sunken ship, and the dead begin to say her name.

The shard is a piece of a drowned king's crown. Silas Marrow, the Tithe-Master, has hunted it for twenty years, paying for every mile with other people's lives. And now he's coming for Kes.

Her only hope is the crew of the Last Lantern, pirates who live by a single rule: the captain pays first. With a gunner who talks to his cannons, a swordswoman with a price on her head, a stowaway with a very small dragon, and a charming thief she absolutely should not trust, Kes must sail past siren reefs, ghost ships and black-sailed fleets to the drowned city of Hallow, where the dead have been waiting a thousand years.

Dark, dangerous, funny and full of heart, A Tithe of Salt and Bone is a swashbuckling young adult fantasy of sword fights, sea monsters and found family, with 27 haunting illustrations.

Some debts are paid in salt. Some are paid in bone.