Rebel Rebel. The Vanati Chronicles, #1

Some worlds are built to be hidden. Some daughters are born to find them anyway. Beneath the surface of Vanati, memory lives and breathes.  Centuries ago, the women who rebuilt civilization from the ruins of war sealed the sky above them and turned inward. They created something extraordinary. Sacred. Whole. Nyïa has grown up at the center of all of it. Daughter of the Qiyaa - ruler and keeper of the flame - Nyïa is heir to a world that has no equal.
She has studied its history in the Pools. She has felt its music hum in her bones since before she could name what she was hearing. She understands what it means to carry a legacy that belongs to more than just yourself. She has also watched that her mother make decisions that cannot be undone. Driven by love and grief, Nyïa crosses a line that cannot be uncrossed. For that, she is unmade. Exiled.
From everything she was supposed to become.--Assad is not the person Nyïa would have chosen to help her find her way back. A simple man operating in the gray space between legality and survival on a world nothing like hers, he is sharp-tongued, deeply skeptical, and profoundly unbothered by the fact that she is royalty. He has his own unfinished business. His own reasons to leave well enough alone.
He doesn't leave well enough alone. What begins as an uneasy alliance becomes something neither of them has a name for yet. Not in the language of Vanati. Not in any language Assad knows. Something built out of close calls and long silences and an honesty that only happens when two strangers are too far from home. Nyïa - exiled, hunted, further from home than any Vanatian has been in living memory - may be the only person standing between her world and everything it was built to survive.
She just has to figure out who she is first. Rebel Rebel is the debut in the Vanati Chronicles, a sweeping science fiction fantasy set across worlds of living memory, ancient power, and civilizations rebuilt from grief. It is a story about daughters and the mothers who shaped them. About the weight of legacy and the cost of defiance. About two strangers who find, in each other, the particular courage that comes from being truly, inconveniently seen.
For readers of N. K. Jemisin's world-building depth, Tomi Adeyemi's mythic sweep, and Becky Chambers' warm, character-driven intimacy. The sky once wept a question, and from it, the forests grew.