The Witch's Inheritance: Tidebinder Chronicles : Book One

She came to sell an inheritance. The tide had other plans. Mara Ashford is a structural engineer. She deals in things that hold - load-bearing walls, tension calculations, evidence she can measure. When a solicitor's letter arrives telling her she has inherited Carrow's End, a coastal witch's mansion she has barely heard of, she goes expecting to assess and sell it within three weeks. What she finds instead: a house full of active bindings that won't dissolve until she understands them. A small-town magical community that has been watching the headland since her grandmother died. A tide magic that has been waiting, apparently, her entire life. And Calder Merrick - the community's authority, a Tide-Speaker whose family has maintained an uneasy partnership with Carrow's End's witch for three generations - who is deeply, visibly unhappy about a magical heir who doesn't believe in the thing she has inherited. Mara gives herself until the Ward Renewal at the turn of winter to figure it out. She does not figure out, going in, that understanding the inheritance means understanding herself. The Witch's Inheritance is a coastal witch fantasy about a woman who built her life from evidence and finds, in a harbour town full of slow magic and stubborn people, that some things can only be learned by staying. It is a slow burn fantasy romance woven through with sea magic mystery, a small-town magical community that earns its warmth, and a magical inheritance that turns out to be more than a house. For readers of atmospheric fantasy, cozy fantasy mystery, and adult witch fantasy with found family at its heart - and for anyone who has ever built themselves in opposition to something they were afraid to understand. Book One of The Tidebinder Chronicles.