Magic in Ordrey cannot make. It can only keep.
Iona Halloway won.
She stood up in a hall and asked the Proctorate where the fees went, and a realm found out that its harbours and aqueducts and sea-walls are held up by a hundred thousand private losses, burning quietly underneath them. Fee-taking was suspended. Eleven Ordinaries went into a room to write a report.
What nobody says aloud is that the suspension stopped the money coming in and did not stop it going out.
Summoned to Marrowgate as a witness, Iona learns what a witness actually is: somebody who may be asked, and thanked, and disbelieved. And she finds the second paper — the docket that records which public work a fee was laid on, the day it was taken. Her first is under an aqueduct that moved two inches this winter. Her second, the one that took Corvin Aldreth out of her, is under a harbour arm that lost four feet of itself five days after she paid it.
Because a fee that is laid can also be recovered. Condemn a parish, and whatever is left burning underneath it comes back to be spent somewhere better.
Which means the Proctorate has never once condemned a parish because it was poor.
It condemns them because they are funded.
Corvin is in the gallery — stripped of office, four fees paid, forbidden to be examined until the council reports. He remembers every hour of the ninety-seven days. She has read about them in his own handwriting and cannot feel a thing, and she is not going to pretend otherwise, and she likes him anyway.
Then the arithmetic comes for her parish, and the only price left on the table is the last of what she has of him.
Dual POV, close third. Book Two of four: its own story resolves, and the saga goes one crack wider.