Songless

Burned Hearts Need Clean Water

In the Valley of the Oaks, seventy-two young women are chosen as Princesses. Every Friday at sunset they sing to the Great Oak. Their voices are the only thing standing between the valley and the Vanishers, who come on the winds twice a year and take whatever they please. A clock. A child. A husband. Whatever will break you.

Hawthorne Arden has been a Princess for four years. Then the Vanishers take her song voice, and she’s known all along what that valley does to those the song cannot protect.

There is one way back. The women on the mountain can undo a vanishing. But that comes at a price. Hawthorne agrees to pay it before she even knows what it is, and she means to carry it out believing, to the last moment, that she is the one in the right. Until that moment comes, when a stranger stops her hand.

What waits for her on the other side of that night is not the punishment she was promised, but a King she was raised to fear, a soldier who will not let her go, and a desert where no thirst is ever quenched.

Songless: The Desert is the first book in the Songless saga. It is a frontier fantasy about exile and forgiveness, written for listeners who prefer their heroines guilty and their mercy unearned.