By Blood and Water

von Christ-Loisele Atidegla

230 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Some debts are older than kingdoms. Some are paid in blood, and some in water.West Africa, 1926. Sèna and Mawuli married as enemies, the sealed door of the old root wed to the iron of the coast, two rival crowns bound by a prophecy neither of them chose. A year of stolen nights has turned a marriage of state into the one thing a watched kingdom cannot afford: love. And love, in a country the deep has never stopped hunting, is a debt waiting to be called.When Sèna conceives, the water mother of the lagoon comes for what she believes she is owed. The child has been marked since before she was made, wanted by a hunger as patient as the tide, and the only things between the cradle and the deep are a queen who can hold any door shut but one and a smith-king who will burn away everything he is to forge a ward strong enough to keep his daughter.But the deep does not fight fair. It offers Sèna the single thing she cannot seal away. It offers Mawuli the end of every doubt he has carried since boyhood. And through a rival who has sold himself to the society that eats in the dark, it whispers that some doors are meant to open, whatever it costs to hold them closed.She will guard the threshold. He will pay in iron and bone. And the war for their daughter will teach them the cruelest law of the turning world: the debt is never paid. It is only carried, and passed to the child strong enough to bear it.By Blood and Water is the second book in The Children of Tado, an epic romantasy steeped in the gods, divination, and Vodun heritage of West Africa. For readers who love arranged-marriage slow burn, fierce married love, folklore-rich worldbuilding, and a devotion that holds when the dark comes for everything.