She Gave Her Grief a Thousand Mouths

Qâ Wuoni was born with a bare wrist, and in Qohor, that is to be born already condemned. The Unmarked are starved for sport, sold into servitude, and buried without mourning. Wuoni knows this because she endured it: seven winters of prayers unto an Artist who never answered; and one terrible night that stole from her two girls she had dearly loved. She ought to have perished beside them.

She did not.

Five years gone, and she's returned carrying a mentor's hand-won lessons in her bones and one purpose: to split asunder the great lie before which an entire kingdom kneels, and with it the cage built around every Unmarked life. Yet the nearer she comes to setting that lie aflame, the more she finds herself circling the same wound - a home freely given that she could never persuade herself to keep; a friend from another life whose forgiveness she both craves and refuses to want, and a grief so vast that she has learned, time and again, to simply cease being the person who must needs bear it.

Then the bodies begin to appear - Marked bodies, wrists blackened, throats and ribs split open beneath blossoms that ought never grow from living flesh. One becomes ten. Ten becomes a pestilence without remedy and mercy, spreading through a kingdom that has never before had cause to fear the very gift it worships. As it spreads, it drags forth a history long buried, upon whose bones the Crown has raised its claim to power.

Now, a fractured company of unlikely allies - a woman who no longer remembers who she once was, a guilt-wracked scholar, a fighter chasing her mother's murderers, a healer who's beginning to ask forbidden questions, and a devout prodigy imprisoned by the very beliefs she was raised to defend - must decide how much of themselves they are willing to surrender to stop what is coming, and whether a kingdom built upon another people's suffering is worthy of salvation at all.

Some griefs do not remain buried. Some find a thousand mouths through which to scream.