The Saltwater Truce at Mercy Bend

About this book:

The war ended with a broken bugle call and a chapel bell, but the Delta doesn't honor armistices. As salt water surges thirty miles inland through shattered dykes, drowning homesteads and swallowing the records that might prove who owns what's left, a ragtag crew flees the ruins of Mercy Bend in a flatbottom skiff: a sergeant who doesn't row, a Hospitaller with splinted fingers, a boatwoman whose copper-kissed skin marks her as Silt-Cast, a disgraced clerk clutching waterlogged deed books, a feverish scout rotting from marsh-wounds, an ancient surveyor, and a barefoot girl who hears timber scream. They have hours before the bore hits, miles of trip-wired channels, and enemies on both banks who haven't heard—or don't care—that the peace was signed.

In this sodden, spell-haunted delta, the landscape itself is a character: reed beds that whisper coordinates, mud with teeth, iron rivets that fight the wood holding them, and a rising tide that moves like a hammer blow. The magic here isn't spectacle—it's survival, etched in silt-runes and river-runes, carried in the blood of those who stayed too long in the brackish reaches. Every chapter pulls the current tighter: ghost tides, breached levees, a drowned sluice gate, a ferryman's remnant, and a bargain whose weight may sink them all.

Gritty, lyrical, and steeped in the smell of sulfur and rot, *The Saltwater Truce at Mercy Bend* is a post-war odyssey where the true enemy isn't the opposing army—it's the land reclaiming its own, the salt in the wound, and the uneasy alliances forged when the water rises and there's nowhere left to dig in.