The Mapmaker of Wrenfold

A retired royal mapmaker. A village the world is quietly forgetting. And an ink that draws back what was lost.

After thirty-one years charting border fortresses and the quarrels of kings, Maren Wick wants only one thing: to live somewhere too small to matter. She retires to Wrenfold - a valley village the official maps dismiss in four words - and inherits an old drafting table, a strange dark bottle of ink labeled For what is lost, and a slow, creeping wrongness she can't measure away.

The mail coach forgets the turn. The village's name fades from every chart she owns. The traders stop coming over the bridge. Wrenfold, it seems, is coming unstitched - and an ancient charter cut into the old crossing, two words deliberately gouged away, holds the reason why.

With the help of a sharp-eyed eleven-year-old apprentice, a wary innkeeper, and a keeper of the river made of water itself, Maren sets out to draw the one map of her career that matters: a map of everything the village has lost. To save Wrenfold, she'll have to gather its names, its songs, and its griefs - and learn that some things are only truly found once you're ready to let them go.

The Mapmaker of Wrenfold is a warm, bittersweet cozy fantasy about memory, belonging, and finding home - perfect for readers of Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes, Sangu Mandanna, and T. Kingfisher. A gentle, self-contained tale to be read by the fire with good bread and better company.