Oathtide (Oathtide Cycle Book 1)

Seven years after the Crown erased an island from its maps, disgraced tide-cartographer Mara Ní Fhaoláin is summoned home by the daughter she abandoned—just as nine forgotten coastlines begin demanding their names back.

When the living Crown Atlas begins returning nine erased coastlines, an exiled cartographer must confront an empire built on manipulated oaths—and the family she once abandoned in the name of protecting them.

The Crown erased nine coastlines.
The sea remembered every one.
Seven years ago, tide-cartographer Mara Ní Fhaoláin proved that a route the Crown had removed from its maps still existed.
She was right.
Three hundred and twelve people died anyway.
Mara has spent the years since in exile, guiding refugees through waters the law insists are not there and living with the lesson that shattered her family:
being right does not give you the right to choose for everyone else.
Then the Oathtide arrives thirteen days early.
Black salt begins writing across ships and streets.
Bells throughout the capital speak the names of harbours, islands and peoples erased from official charts.
And through the impossible chorus comes one voice Mara has not heard in years.
Her daughter.
Seventeen-year-old Ailbhe Rourke is an apprentice name-keeper inside Atlas Hall, where the Crown’s living map is tearing itself apart.
Eight lost coastlines can be heard by everyone.
Ailbhe hears nine.
To reach her, Mara must return east aboard Faoileán, the red-sailed ship she once shared with master shipwright Cian Rourke—the husband she left behind when she decided exile would protect him and their child.
Neither has forgiven her.
Neither should.
But the Crown is preparing to bind a new map before the old one can reveal what was stolen from it.
And the magic beneath the empire remembers laws older than the Crown.
Oaths require consent.
Maps remember their makers.
Names can survive their own erasure.
And every system built on somebody else’s silence eventually has to answer one question:
Who was allowed to refuse?
Oathtide is Book One of the Oathtide Cycle, a sweeping mythic maritime epic fantasy of living maps, dangerous oaths, fractured families, political power, erased nations and people learning that responsibility is not the same thing as ownership.