A City Bound in Silk

In the seventeenth day of the siege, the kitchen fires are still burning at the Pink Lantern - and Calder Vetch is still counting every bowl.

Once, he was paid to certify that documents were what they claimed to be. Now he keeps a failing house running on credit, borrowed grain, and favors he can't repay, while two armies argue over who owns the city outside his door.

Then three women arrive out of the flood, and one of them carries a register Calder knows too well. Twelve years ago he signed his name to it. He certified its surfaces sound, its marks genuine, its sequence intact. He was right about all of it - and it is still destroying people.

Because the book's pages have been made to tell a different story than the one burned into its spine. And in a city where a claim on labor can be written as a claim on a person, hundreds of names now belong to a schedule no witness ever closed.

To prove it, Calder will have to read the one document he spent years learning not to think about - and reckon with what he once did for a fee, and what it cost the woman who used to share his rooms.

The siege is closing. The register is counting. And every day the Lantern stays open, someone else comes to the door.

Book One of the Aruven Novels