What the Tide Remembers

The sea has been taking Cormorant Reach a hand's width at a time for three generations. What it leaves behind, the Court takes. Every year the tithe barge comes to the drowned isles, and every year the islanders pay in the only currency the Ninefold Court accepts: remembrance. A memory given is gone - that is the first line on the first page of the book they hand a wright at eleven years old, and Sable Reyn has been reading it her whole life.
She is a diver. She works the flooded orchard where her grandmother's apple trees stand in ranks of black coral, and she has put off the Court for as long as anyone can. Then the barge comes a month early, eleven people drown in the harbour, and Sable is written onto a retention roll by a man she has never met - Cassien Dural of the Ninth Tier, who has spent eleven years waiting for one particular morning and will not say why.
Above her: a court built in nine tiers up a dry hill, where memory is levied, banked and spent, and where the man who signs the orders has been signing them a very long time. Beside her: Ferrow Idryss, who took her off the stair and has never once asked for anything back. Behind her: a sister on an island that is still going under. Sable came up the hill to survive a season. She is going to find out what the Court has been doing with everything it took, and the answer is written in a ledger she was never meant to read.
A standalone romantasy of drowned islands, court intrigue, and a love triangle where nobody is lying about what they want. Complete in one volume. No cliffhanger.