The Saltglass Compact

Wren Calloway can read the truth in a sliver of saltglass — the true position of an island that drifts a little further every month, the exact width of a lie. What she can't read is her own future, not until the Tideward Court hands it to her in a single cruel sentence: she is to marry the heir of House Draven, the family her own has hated for twenty years, and end the war her wedding was ordered to fix. The ship sent to carry her to that wedding is captained by a man cursed for a crime he didn't commit. Cassian Reyes inherited his father's ship, his father's debt, and a curse that will not let him set foot on land for longer than a single night — not until the twenty-year-old feud his father supposedly started is finally, truly resolved. He has no more choice in this voyage than she does. Two weeks at sea. One reluctant bride. One captain who has spent twelve years surviving a sentence that was never his to serve. And a saltglass shard, salvaged from the very wreck that started it all, suggesting the story everyone has believed for twenty years might be a lie someone built on purpose. As the Hollow Tide carries them from waystation to waystation, evidence to evidence, Wren and Cassian find the one thing neither of them was looking for aboard a ship bound for someone else's wedding — and uncover a conspiracy that reaches all the way to the Tideward Court itself. To break the curse, save the crew who never should have been bound to it, and choose each other, they will have to do what no one has managed in twenty years: tell the Drift the truth. A slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers romantasy of forced proximity, forbidden magic, and a curse that was never really about who it punished — only about who it protected.