The Daughters of Izdihar

Nehal is an aristocrat who has always had her way. She is also a waterweaver, able to move and shape any water, but she has no formal training. Her dream is a place at the newly opened Weaving Academy and, after that, a career in the first all-female military regiment.

Her father's gambling debt ends that plan. To keep the family afloat, Nehal is married into a wealthy merchant household. Her husband, Nico, keeps his distance and is in love with someone else.

That someone is Giorgina, who works in a bookshop and has no money and no prospects. She is an earthweaver whose power is dangerous because she cannot control it, and she hides it. The one place she belongs is the Daughters of Izdihar, a radical women's rights group pressing for women to have a say in their own lives.

This is fantasy set in an invented world, shaped by modern Egyptian history, and it opens a duology. Nehal and Giorgina come from opposite ends of society, yet the cause, Nico and the group's leader, Malak Mamdouh, draw them together. Weaving is forbidden, and a neighboring nation wants weavers gone, so war hangs over their fight for a freedom that lasts.