What We Promise the Water

The lake is leaving. And as the water draws back, Valdeniebla's last secret is coming up to the surface.

It hasn't rained in months. By October the Cerval is a shrunken eye ringed with cracked mud, and the children of the village go down every afternoon to see what the drought has left behind: bottles, a cartwheel, a boot, a small brass crucifix. Then a shepherd finds his flock dead on the shore, and an old tin box turns up with a notebook inside, written in 1954 by a woman named Matilde Ruiz.

Laura knows the name. Matilde was her great-grandmother. In the winter of 1953, with a flu epidemic emptying the houses of the valley, the Order put her into a boat one night, and at dawn she came out of the water alive, in the next valley over, with a promise she never told anyone.

Now the notebook says what she saw down there. And someone in Valdeniebla, someone Laura has known all her life, has spent seventy years making sure that promise is kept.

With the lake at its lowest and the village at its most silent, Laura and Marcos follow the water one last time: into the parish books, into the old men's stories, and into the drowned places the drought has opened, to find out what Valdeniebla promised the water, and what the water is still owed.

What We Promise the Water is the final book in the Valdeniebla trilogy, an atmospheric small-town mystery with a supernatural edge. It brings the story that began in The Guardian of the Lake to its close.