A petition costs a copper. It can cost a life.

Mara Verl writes for those who cannot: widows, men who inherited their grandfather's debt, people never entered in the book and therefore never pulled from the water. She believes the pen can be taken over – the Code rewritten from the inside, line by line, until power has to answer to the people it counts.

Darr Vorn, his face burned by boiling peat, believes something else: the pen is never given, it is taken.

Between them lie the Rotten Settlements on their rafts, the Ink Court on its dry hill, and a river that does its own counting every spring. And through the slums moves a rumour of a third man – one who wants neither the chair nor the pen, because he is coming to burn down the place where writing happens.

Book two of The Quill: the price of a single line, and two people who want the same thing and cannot walk together.