The Penny Workings. Eight standalone tales from the wave that spread out from Rivensol after one press broke the aristocracy's hold on magic. A copyist, a kiln-man, a sheet-seller, a printer working worn second-hand plates: ordinary working people the change arrives at, one document at a time. Every story is complete in a single sitting, every ending turns on something you were shown in plain sight, and no story needs the one before it.
The Books
Book 1
The Registrar's Hand
Josina Brenner copies leases for a penny a sheet, until a printing shop inside the wall makes her trade worthless. A dealer offers three months' living for four lines in the parish registrar's hand. She writes it well. Then she carries her forgery to the registry counter to give herself up, and the clerk lays it against the great book.
Coming soon
Book 2
The Keeping Leaf
Aefje Poel makes boots that do not rot, because every month she buys a cheap printed keeping-leaf off a pedlar's pack and lays it in the seam. Then the proclamation goes up on the yard gate, eightpence becomes three shillings, and eight pairs of dispatch boots are wanted by first light on the seventh day. A complete Renaissance fantasy in one sitting.
Coming soon
Book 3
The Clean Water
Odo Verrin burns confiscated print in his lime kiln for the only coin at the ford. He kept one sheet back three summers ago, and his water has run clear ever since. On Friday the Warden comes to look.
Coming soon
Book 4
The Sweet Air
A shaft past forty feet kills by air, not by falling. When Gerrit Broch's well comes in on itself, three men come up alive at dawn and his boy does not, and under the wrecked crown timber lies an unmarked sweet-air sheet with the duty unpaid. He has two days before the steward's hearing. One sitting. One turn.
Coming soon
Book 5
Nothing Burns Yet
Truda Wielant sells fire-stay sheets she knows are dead paper, because on a glutted fair field it is the one line no buyer can test before he pays. Five days to raise the fee for a covered pitch. Every other stall on the field is honest, and that is not the comfort she takes it for.
Coming soon
Book 6
Good Paper
Fourteen bolts of mourning black, dyed and delivered by the funeral. A day and a night to do it in. Marthe Sund buys good paper to blot the colour on, out of a dead house's pulped record room, and then the house's factor comes down the hill offering over the odds for it. A standalone Renaissance tale with a twist in the tail.
Coming soon
Book 7
The Tide Following
Coen Kolder has collected twopence a man on the Vresk quay for ten years, and the boatmen's burial club stands on one cheap printed page with a worked seal. At the ten-year reckoning, the one certificate he has never been allowed to hold comes in off the road. He cannot read. He can read an edge.
Coming soon
Book 8
The Stones Hold
Twelve years, and the miller's stones have never needed dressing. The coast calls it luck. Then the meal comes off warm and grey, the bakers send it back, and the flaking leaf pasted inside the loft door has finally gone. Nine days to the season's letting, and not another sheet to be had on the whole coast.
Coming soon