Saltmark

She was taken from the sky. She intends to fly home free.

Wren Halloran read wind and water for her nation's fleet until the day she refused to fly a fractured keel. Cashiered for it. Then sky-boarded and taken by Captain Soren Vale, a pirate with a storm in his hands and an empty navigator's berth: his died in the Widow's Belt, and the ghost strait ahead will kill a crew without a pilot who can read the deep.

She is that pilot. He knows it. She knows he knows it.

Aboard a windship held aloft by lift cells and stormglass, Wren earns the helm one squall at a time: teaching a deck boy to read water color off a sounding lead, calling the reefing sequence through a killer squall, threading a reef slot in the dark while her old fleet's dreadnought hunts them under Commodore Kessler, the man who ended her career. The crew becomes hers the hard way, watch by watch, and Soren becomes something more complicated: the only captain who ever trusted her hands.

But Soren's storms are not weather. They are bargains, paid in memories, and the Drowned Court is counting every stroke she takes at the helm. When Kessler offers her a pardon in exchange for Soren's head, Wren answers with a pirate's defiance and flies the one passage no sane pilot attempts.

Saltmark is the first book in the Tidebound series, a pirate fantasy romance of storm-touched skies, found-family crews, and slow-burn heat. The storm marks who it wants.