The Map of Silent Lands

“They burned out his tongue for refusing to forge a map. Now a novice brings him the road the crown erased from every atlas.”

Rodrigo de Molina was the kingdom's chief cartographer until he refused to paint the common pastures of Valdelobos as wasteland; the Chancery burned out his tongue and shut him away copying psalters in the Monastery of the Crags. One morning Leonor de Ayala, the prior's niece, slips him a portolan from Oakhaven's first queen showing a secret pass over the glacier of the Three Sisters, along with a warning: at dawn the escort arrives to take him to the gallows. They flee that same night with the tercios behind them, but the map is three hundred years old and the ice has moved. To find the pass they will have to measure it again, with the stars she knows how to read and the hands he has left.