The Hollow Crown of Ashmere
Maren Caldwell inherits more than grief when her father dies of fever, his fingers still curled around an oilskin packet containing incomplete maps, a compass that hums against her palm, and instructions that lead her to Ashmere, a town shrouded in mist and absent from every chart. In the crooked tavern run by Old Bess and her silent family, Maren learns that children have begun disappearing from the streets, their names scraped from records and their memories fading like wet ink. Rylan Voss, a smuggler haunted by the spectral image of his lost daughter, stands accused of the vanishings by Mayor Helda Brannick and her complicit council, but the evidence keeps shifting, rewritten overnight. As the Bog Knight rises from the peatlands and memory-moths swarm the marshes, Maren discovers her father's cartography was never about land. It was a record of the people a distant power wants erased, witnessed by a spectral librarian who gave her life to keep the archive alive. Now a Southern Crownwright has arrived to claim what remains, and the compass in Maren's hand is the only map to a history someone is desperate to bury. To save Ashmere's children, she must finish what her father started, and accept that some truths are written in blood.