Fourteen-year-old Tilly Roke arrives at Saltveil Conservatory, a cliffside school for witches where the salt remembers, the rooms listen, and every working has a cost. She carries a secret her gran taught her to keep: she can taste poison the way other water-witches taste rain, and at Saltveil, poison magic is forbidden.
But the school is sick. A silence called the Hush is dimming the lower dorms, and a quiet faction inside the walls believes Tilly’s forbidden gift is the only cure. Before her first term ends, she will have to choose between the truth that could send her home and the silence that leaves someone else paying the cost.
