Marigold (The Smoke & Salt Series Book 1) Kindle Edition

Seventeen-year-old Marigold is weeks away from aging out of foster care when a court order upends everything: a grandmother she has never met has petitioned for custody. Rowan Emery lives in the mountains of Tennessee, in a town called Edens Gap—far from the group homes and motel rooms Marigold has known her whole life. With nowhere else to go, she follows the thin paper trail of blood south.From the moment she arrives, the place feels… attentive. The farmhouse creaks at the wrong times. The townspeople look too long. Rowan’s daughters—sharp-tongued Penny and gentle, unsettling Willow—move through a household thick with herbs, rituals disguised as chores, and rules no one explains. And Marigold’s body keeps betraying her: headaches, heat under her ribs, flashes of vertigo whenever the air hums too loudly.Then the dreams start.In sleep, Marigold wanders into a blue-hazed elsewhere and meets a dry, unreadable man who claims to be guarding something he will not name. When she touches the book he is reading, the world stutters—proving these visions are not imagination, but doors.Rowan finally tells her the truth her mother worked hard to bury: Marigold comes from a line of women bound to the land and to the house itself, inheritors of a quiet, dangerous magic once suppressed by yearly draughts meant to keep it dormant. With her eighteenth birthday approaching, that protection is failing.As rumors ripple through Edens Gap and animals begin reacting to her presence, it becomes clear that the mountains remember the Emery bloodline—and that something on the ridges has started paying attention again.Marigold must decide whether to run from a legacy she never asked for or learn how to survive inside it… before the place that has been waiting for her decides what she is meant to become. Read more