The Warden's Debt (Pella's Journey Book 3)

The bond took her signature before she thought to ask permission. Beneath the city of Valendris, a street has been drowned for four hundred years — and someone has been quietly maintaining a door into it since summer. When Pella and Ember uncover the arch, the ward built into it does more than notice them. It reports them, north, to an owner with modern training and an old, old claim. Tracing that claim means tracing the city itself: tax rolls, sealed deeds, a windowless house that burns through supplies for a family that doesn't exist. It leads somewhere Pella never let herself imagine — to the office that decides who gets heat, water, and light in Valendris, and to the woman who has run it, and the ruin beneath it, for thirty-one years. Sabine Crestfall isn't hiding a secret. She's hiding an inheritance: four hundred years of ledgers, a system built to keep a city alive by choosing, quietly, who it lets go cold. She has an offer for Pella, and it isn't a threat. It's worse. It's a job. With Wickfield burning, the Houses circling a vote they'd rather lose slowly than win honestly, and Ember carrying a fear she's never let the bond show, Pella has to decide what kind of warden she's going to be — the kind who inherits the ledger, or the kind who rewrites what it's allowed to say. The Warden's Debt is Book 3 of Pella's Journey, a YA fantasy series about the cost of keeping people safe, and who gets to decide who pays it.