A Requiem of Salt and Sorrow: 2

She ended one drowned city's god. The sea it had held back rolled down the coast - and drowned another. Months after the fall of Caelmoor, Nerys Calloran and Cassius Vane sail a foundling-crowded boat into Mereth Drun - a blinding, salt-white city on a dying sea, where the dead have begun arriving wrong, and a priesthood called the Choir of the Drowned keeps the deep asleep beneath a requiem that has not fallen silent in six hundred years. The Choir's mercy has a price, and the price is children. Nerys swore she would go down into the dark for every child still falling in it. But Mereth Drun remembers what her last act of mercy cost this coast - and one of its cantors remembers Nerys by the name she was given in a curved white room, before the Order tore the two of them apart. To save the city's gifted children - and the deepest reader the coast has produced in a century - Nerys will have to descend past a god that cannot be severed, a friend who became its keeper, and the man who made the love of her life. And at the bottom of the world she will find a truth that unmakes everything she believes about mercy: The thing the whole coast has been drowning is not a monster. It never was. And the only way to end the drowning is to go all the way down - held, this time, by everyone she loves-and learn, at last, the one thing no one on this grieving coast has ever survived long enough to teach: how to hold the one who holds the world.