The Mouth That Drinks Silence

Some things are buried because they are dead. Others are buried because they are waiting.

Sixteenth-century Ethiopia.

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A queen stands at the centre of a kingdom held together by blood, faith and uneasy loyalties. Around her, old rivalries sharpen, alliances shift, and men speak of power as though it belongs only to those who can seize it.

But Queen Asebiyah is beginning to understand that the greatest danger may not come from the court.

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Something has begun to move beneath the surface of her world.

A silence that does not feel empty.

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A memory that does not belong entirely to the living.

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A mark upon the body that seems to remember what the mind cannot.

And somewhere beyond the safety of palace walls, Wubit, a seer from Smoke Hollow, has already seen enough to know that what is coming will not remain hidden.

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Drawn together by events none of them fully understand, Asebiyah, Wubit, Mehari and those bound to them are pulled towards a history that was never truly buried, and towards forces that do not announce themselves with spells or miracles, but through dreams, wounds, ritual, absence and the terrible feeling that something ancient has recognised you.

The Mouth That Drinks Silence is the first book in The Zewditu Books, a sweeping literary historical series set in sixteenth-century Ethiopia, where queens, warriors, priests and seers move through a world in which political power is dangerous, faith is intimate, and the unseen is never far from the living.

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This is a story of inheritance.

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Of women whose power has been underestimated.

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Of loyalty tested by fear.

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Of the histories kingdoms choose to forget.

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And of what happens when the past begins to remember you.

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