About Of Salt and Sovereigns by Claire Willowbrook:
The sea takes what it’s owed. This year, it wants her.
For twenty-two years, Maren Sael has kept the tide-magic under her skin, because in Cinderhollow a salt-witch is a debt the village drowns before the Court can. But when the tithe falls short and the sea comes to collect a life, Maren does the one thing she swore she never would: she offers herself.
Bound for a year and a day to Aerec Vol — the cold, centuries-old Sovereign whose laws let the sea take her mother — Maren is dragged down into a drowned palace of impossible beauty and quiet knives. The Court sees her as a curiosity. A target. A pet on a leash.
None of them know what she is. Aerec does. And the bond sealed between them reads her as clearly as she reads him — every lie, every want, every reason she should hate him and doesn’t.
To survive a coup, a smiling traitor, and a drowned god waking in the deep, Maren will have to stop hiding her magic — and decide what she’s willing to burn to keep a man she was never supposed to want.
Some debts aren’t paid. They’re chosen.
Book 1 of the Drowned Court trilogy. Closed-door romantasy — slow burn, no explicit content.
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Author Bio:
Claire Willowbrook writes two kinds of escape, and refuses to choose between them. Under the Twisted Leaf Mysteries, she keeps a teashop in the seaside village of Harrow’s Cove, the kind of place where the kettle is always on, everyone knows your order, and the occasional body turns up between the scones. These are cozy mysteries: warm, puzzle-first, low on gore and high on small-town heart. Her other world is the Drowned Court, a sea-bound realm of old bargains, shifting tides, and loyalties that cost more than they should. Her romantasy trilogy runs darker and slower-burning, with romance that earns every inch of it.