Singer of Rains

Three years, and the sky has held its water like a closed fist. In the high court of Sovane, the treaties are dying the way the law says they must: when the rains fail, the bond is loosed until the rains return. The envoys of the lower kingdoms bring grain instead of cattle. The Meridian ships water in the harbor below, paying in coin and asking, always, for maps. And Queen Virelle - forty-one years old and looking sixty, the cost of her own rain-singing written into her face - sits still on the stone seat while the law unmakes her. Her daughter Sefula was the court’s brightest singer, once. Two years ago she called rain out of season, and the dead named their double: the voice of her younger brother Kess. Now Kess, seventeen and voiceless, keeps the palace rain-barrels with a chalk slate and a shorthand of his own invention, and Sefula lives every day with what her song cost him. Then the queen commissions her for one last crossing. The sky holds water - Sefula has felt it herself, down at the cistern - but the dead will not open the door. So she will go across the Dry to the Hollow of the First Rain and wake the First Singer, to ask the dead themselves why they have stopped answering. The precedent is three hundred years old: a girl of nineteen, a caravan of forty, eleven who came back. With her goes Tomás Reys, a cartographer in Meridian employ, sent to draw an unsentimental chart of an interior his masters insist is empty - unpeopled, ungoverned, unclaimed. Sefula has one condition: the Hollow does not go on his chart. His instruments will keep them alive in the Dry; her song will keep them alive. If either of them mistakes which of those is the weapon, they are both dead. A standalone epic fantasy of debt and drought, of law and song - and of a sister willing to cross a desert to ask the dead a single question: what will it take to bring the rain?