The Cartographer's Bargain

A cartographer who finally finds his missing brother discovers the cost was never his alone to pay.

For six years, Tarek Al-Bashir has drawn map after map of the Cinder Reach, searching for the brother he lost to its collapsed mine shafts. Eleven surveys. Eleven failures. Then a strange vendor offers him a compass that finds anything the holder truly seeks — and within a single night, Tarek finally has the answer he's been chasing for six agonizing years.

But the compass doesn't simply find. It borrows — a rival's memory of streets he's walked for sixty years, his own fiancée's ability to find her way home, fragments of the very thing that makes each of them who they are. Every road Tarek finds is paid for by someone standing close enough to lose it.

Bound inside the compass is Feyra, a djinn-cartographer who has spent three thousand years searching for a homeland destroyed so completely that no map remembers its name — and who will not stop taking until someone finally tells her the one truth no holder before Tarek has ever dared to offer: that some roads don't lead home. They lead to the courage to finally stop looking.

The Cartographer's Bargain is Book Three of the Gilded Sands Chronicles, a series of stand-alone dark-fantasy novellas about ordinary people, ancient bargains, and the true cost of getting exactly what you wished for.