1350. A coastline that no map records.
For three hundred years, the people of Ironshore have survived by remaining unseen - a Norse-descended settlement on the edge of a continent Europe does not yet know exists.
Then smoke rises to the south. A neighboring village is gone. Not raided. Not looted. Simply erased.
Einarr is sent to learn what happened. What he finds is not an army. It is something more patient: men who measure the land, who trace movement, who do not rush.
Forty-three years earlier, a Templar fled Paris carrying something the Church wanted back.
The men hunting Ironshore are still looking.
The council faces a choice; neither path survives unchanged. Remain hidden, and be slowly mapped. Change what Ironshore is, and risk being seen. Both cost something that cannot be recovered.
Iron Shores is the first volume of The Ironshore Chronicles - a literary historical series set in the decades after the Templar suppression. A story of secrecy, surveillance, and a relentless pursuit that does not need to hurry.
For readers of Guy Gavriel Kay, Hilary Mantel, and Ken Follett.