Elara Venn and the Silent Compass

Magic is not learned. It is remembered.Eleven-year-old Elara Venn draws maps of places that do not exist. She notices things others miss. And without meaning to, she makes clocks stop.In the coastal town of Frostwick, magic is illegal. The Ministry of Weights and Measures hunts children who show signs of wild magic and sends them to Correctional Facilities, where their gifts are erased. Elara has spent her whole life hiding what she is. But when a Ministry inspector arrives at her door with a silver cage and a cold smile, her secret explodes before her eyes.She is not an ordinary child with strange accidents.She is a Null.A Null does not cast spells. A Null unpicks them. She unravels knots that others spend years tying. And she is the rarest, most dangerous kind of mage in existence.Taken from her father and shipped to a sunken archipelago called the Silts, Elara is locked inside the Guild of the Unspoken Art. The Guild is a prison disguised as a school. Its walls are covered in silver ivy. Its library whispers secrets. And somewhere beneath its foundations lies the Font of Echoes, the source of all magic, guarded by a two-hundred-year-old knot called the Grand Silence.The Ministry wants Elara to tighten that knot. Her mother tried to undo it and was erased from history. Now the compass that belonged to her mother ticks in Elara's pocket, pointing to broken magic and darker truths.With the help of a sharp-tongued thief named Rook and a gentle girl who grows light in her hands, Elara must learn the Unspoken Alphabet, survive the Bone Lighthouse, and unpick the Grand Silence before the Ministry unpicks her.Because a Null does not break things. She sets them free.