Year one, a printed working is contraband. By year twelve it is stationery. In between, one press in Rivensol breaks the aristocracy's hold on magic and cheap printed workings move outward along the roads, a cellar dried for a penny, meal that keeps through the winter. Each of these eight tales follows one ordinary working person the wave arrives at, and turns on a single piece of paper.
Nothing here is a trick: the workings do what the paper says, and the world is plainly better for them. It is the people who are slightly wrong about their own lives, in ways the last page corrects. No chosen ones, no academy, no quest. Tales of the Unexpected moved to Renaissance trade life. Complete in one sitting, fair-play planted, better the second time, readable in any order.
The Books
Book 1
The Registrar's Hand
A shop inside the wall sells lease forms at fourpence the dozen; Josina copies at a penny the sheet. Her room goes Thursday. That night a man sets a wrapped leaf on her board and names his price in months.
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Book 2
The Keeping Leaf
Aefje's boots do not come back opened at the seam, and the yard wants eight pairs by first light on the seventh day. The proclamation went up that morning; the month's leaf has gone from eightpence to three shillings.
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Book 3
The Clean Water
Stone, then coal, then stone. Odo's kiln above the ford burns whatever the Warden's office sends up, and in three years nobody has come to look at it. On Friday somebody is coming, with the contracts being cut.
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Book 4
The Sweet Air
Sixty-one feet of shaft, and a year's wages ride on one sign-off before the frost. Then the crib goes. When they draw the timber, a penny sheet lies under the crown cap, nothing stamped in the corner.
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Book 5
Nothing Burns Yet
Fire-stay costs Truda nothing: it comes out of the sack the press sweeps off its own floor. Nothing in a hand or an eye tells one sheet from another. Five shillings by the fifth day buys a covered pitch.
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Book 6
Good Paper
Fourteen bolts of mourning black by tomorrow noon, and two sound vats where Marthe wants three. The ruled paper she blots the colour on cost threepence the pound off a barrow. The house's man wants it back at five shillings.
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Book 7
The Tide Following
Coen collects twopence a man on the quay, ten years of it, the book open on his arm and arrears filling the back. Fourteen days to Martinmas: every paper back in the box by number, every arrear in or struck.
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Book 8
The Stones Hold
Warm meal off the spout, and the bakers send yesterday's sack back up the hill. Nine days to the season's letting, on a sample from each mill. Inside Doorn's loft door, the pasted leaf lifts away in two pieces.
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