A Taste of the Drowned

Iceland, 1768. Ragna Jonsdottir has spent years refusing the gift that nearly killed her: with a pinch of salt taken from a drowned body, she can feel fragments of the dead person's final moments. Her resolve is tested when a Danish survey ship wrecks on a reef in clear weather. Ragna breaks her vow and tastes cold, pain, and a strange green light moving beneath the vessel before it turns toward disaster. When another drowned man carries the same impossible glow in his final sensations, coincidence becomes harder to believe. Elias Voss, the ship's surviving naturalist, is the first person who does not call her cursed or holy. He treats what she saw as evidence. His charts say the light should not exist, yet he believes something drew the ship off course. More vessels are at risk, and every answer demands another use of Ragna's gift. Each reading pulls her closer to the death she has never escaped, and toward a man she is beginning to trust. If the green light appears again, how much of herself will she risk to keep another ship from following it?