The Salt Vow: A Romantasy Novel (Ashfall Academy) by Lara K. Thorne

She crossed a world to get free of the empire. To save her mother, she'll have to cross back — into the one place built to destroy exactly what she is. Lyra Vessren survived Ashfall. She reached the country beyond the Veil, found the brother the empire buried a lie for, and learned the truth about her own hidden power: she is a keeper, one of a scattered people who can walk onto a battlefield and turn the empire's bonded soldiers back into ordinary, frightened human beings in the space of a breath. It should feel like safety. It doesn't. Because her mother is still five hundred miles away in the empire's capital — held in a cell that fills with the tide, kept alive only for the two hundred years of secrets locked behind her closed mouth, and marked for drowning the moment they decide she's empty. And the man who holds her isn't guarding a hostage. He's setting a hook. He knows the one person alive who could reach her is the girl who unmade an Ashmaster and vanished east. He's not hunting a prisoner. He's hunting Lyra. To get her mother back, Lyra will have to tear open the Veil, walk into the drowning city, and learn the hardest discipline her strange gift demands: how to spend it without letting it spend Read more