Two hundred and nineteen years ago, eleven men agreed with each other.
Nobody has ever asked them by what right.

Iona Halloway has kept nineteen and a quarter miles of sea-wall for eighteen
years. For the last four she has kept it with nothing underneath it at all; no
licence, no fee, no provision; going up the bank at three in the morning every
night of her life, because nine hundred people sleep behind it and there is
nobody else.

Then the assembly of Ordrey does the thing it has not done in two centuries.
It appoints a Committee. Eleven members. Evidence taken in public. Four
questions, of which the first is the one no officer of the College has ever
been able to answer out loud: by what authority?

They offer Iona one of the two reserved seats. She refuses it; and then
organises the witness list from outside instead.

Corvin Aldreth has spent four years walking the country in the wrong boots,
counting works nobody ever wrote down, at his own charge, so that no one can
say he was bought. He is the only man in the realm that Committee believes on
sight. He knows exactly why, and it is not to his credit.

What the two of them build over three years is not a rebellion. It is a
list. Six hundred and eleven works in Ordrey fail the day one named person
stops, and not one of them has anybody recorded to come after.

The reserve runs out in the year two-twenty-three. Everybody has spent
eleven years imagining that as a date. It does not arrive as a date. It
arrives as four works in three counties inside a single week.

The Proctorate concludes.Nothing recovered is ever returned ; and
somebody still has to go up on the bank at three in the morning.

Book Four of four. The series is complete: a slow burn eight years in the making, a magic system that only
keeps and never makes, and an institution that has just been asked to show
its paperwork.