The Last Cartomancer

by Isolde Marrow · Ongoing · 15 chapters

Talia Vess can read a landscape the way other people read a face — every fold of a map she draws carries a truth deeper than ink. That gift got her exiled. Three years ago, a map she charted led a merchant caravan into the massacre at Windhollow Pass, and though she has never believed her lines were wrong, no one in the kingdom of Aveline will hear her say so. Now the Withering Plague is eating through Aveline's coastline, and the only cure grows in the Shattered Reach — a stretch of land so thick with old, broken magic that compasses lie, rivers run uphill, and the ground itself sometimes forgets what it is. Lady Ishara Kell offers Talia a pardon in exchange for one map: a route through the Reach and back. To get it, Talia needs a guide who can keep her alive long enough to draw it. Enter Ronan Blackwood, mercenary captain, professionally unsentimental, and the last man in Aveline who should trust a disgraced cartomancer — except he has his own reasons for wanting into the Reach, and his own doubts about the woman who hired them both. As the expedition pushes deeper into a land that punishes mistakes with something worse than death, Talia and Ronan will have to decide how much of each other's history they're willing to risk believing. The truth about Windhollow Pass is still out there. So is the truth about who wants Talia to never come back.