Order is not always peace. Sometimes it is just silence with better paperwork.

Lucien Glacisse holds a new title: Circuit Mediator for the Crownlands. Armed with the authority of the Crown, he travels the midlands resolving the friction that keeps the realm from fracturing. Broken contracts, boundary feuds, the ordinary failures of people under pressure. For a man who has spent twenty years answering to a dead boy's name, dispensing the law to others is an irony he does not dwell on.

But something is wrong with the silence.

Entire towns are operating with a precision that has no natural explanation. Harvests arrive on schedule. Disputes resolve before they are filed. The people are compliant, productive, and calm, in the way that things are calm when someone else is doing the thinking for them.

There are no violations to record. That is the problem.

To find the answer, Lucien must travel toward the frozen ridges of the Spine, accompanied by a scarred archivist, an uncompromising peacekeeper, and an unorthodox scholar of entropy. Together they are everything a Circuit Mediator is not supposed to need. The law, it turns out, was only ever as strong as the people it was built to serve.

The Crownlands Circuit is the second book in The Ice Beneath, an atmospheric political fantasy about order, compliance, and what remains when a system outlives its purpose. For fans of Robin Hobb and Joe Abercrombie.

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