The Rain Tithe

About

Rain can be moved, never made. From the copper crown above Beruz, three Tithe adepts can bend a loaded storm across eighty kilometres of sky. The richest basin receives it; another watches the clouds turn away. For four years the lowland city has kept its reservoirs bright and its estates green by taking rain from Ollun valley. Ollun's failed farmers now queue at Beruz standpipes, paying more for jars of the water that left their fields. Neysa Ollun, thirty-five, is the success story the Tithe displays: valley-born, disciplined, and one of the three hands whose fever and failing hearing keep the city alive. Then Neysa finds the names of Ollun well-diggers on a sabotage writ she signed. Her brother Rask, leader of the valley's lawful water petition, supplied them after taking six hundred crowns from Beruz. The payment was authorised by Corvin Dast, the city's water-master and Neysa's lover, who can trace every stolen drop and still argue that central control is the only barrier between rationing and mass death. Ashti Ruun, an Ollun organiser with dust in her clothes and no patience left for petitions, wants Neysa to break the next working, steal the sealed rain ledger, and open the west reservoir. Her love asks Neysa to come home without asking to be forgiven. The last storm of the season gathers over the Sarranth peaks while famine carts enter Saltstep Quarter. A reservoir riot traps workers below twenty-four million cistern-measures. An exhausted adept is ordered back to the crown. Blue ledger leaves move through kitchens, auction halls, and frightened hands, turning proof into leverage and leverage into targets. The dam must be opened or defended, but water obeys slope rather than justice: a reckless release will drown the migrant quarter before it reaches Ollun, while delay will preserve a city built on the valley's hunger. The Rain Tithe is an adult literary fantasy about the complicity of the migrant who escaped, the intimacy of knowing an atrocity's arithmetic, and the permanent injuries demanded by every rescue. Fourteen branch points and seven endings change who controls the water, what becomes public, who survives the gates, and whether Neysa can still hear the rain she chose.

Content notice

• engineered drought and famine
• class violence and forced migration
• graphic riot injury
• death from magical overwork
• hearing loss and fever
• dependence and withdrawal involving a fictional fever tincture
• institutional corruption
• imprisonment and coerced informing
• sexual content implied, cuts away
• family betrayal
• food insecurity
• bigotry shown through behavior and consequence; no slurs written out

Cast

• N Neysa Ollun protagonist; Ollun-born Tithe adept and one of Beruz's three hands no portrait yet
• R Rask Ollun Neysa's brother; leader of the lawful Ollun water petition and paid informer no portrait yet
• C Corvin Dast Beruz water-master; Neysa's lover and buyer of the city's rain no portrait yet
• A Ashti Ruun Ollun organiser; advocate of exposing the ledger and opening the dam no portrait yet
• P Pell Arven senior Tithe adept; first hand of the Beruz working no portrait yet
• J Jori Sen youngest Tithe adept; third hand over Beruz no portrait yet
• E Edran Sare First Assessor of the Tithe; architect of donor secrecy no portrait yet