The Crown of Salt and Ash

For three hundred years Ardennes has had no magic, and no one has missed it. Then a spell flares and dies in a market square, and the Crown sends its youngest archivist to write down what happened. Nell Carrow finds the truth in a flooded basement: magic never left. It has been rationed. Something under the capital, made of salt and ash and three hundred years of drowned queens, has been drinking it under a treaty signed by the first king. The treaty expires this year. The Tide does not want a war. It wants a bloodline, bound and willing, for another three centuries. And the only man in the kingdom who qualifies runs a bathhouse in the lower city and would rather be left alone. A classic high fantasy contemporary fantasy novel about leases, floods, and ten thousand people saying yes at once.