When an earl dies intestate, a London barrister discovers the true heir was raised in a traveling circus—and the false heir will kill to keep the title.
Disgraced and demoted, a Roman tribune is exiled to a restless frontier town on the slopes of Etna, where a volcanic eruption, a mutiny of soldiers, and a secret of the volcano god's temple pull him toward one last impossible campaign.
A young man born into the crew of a raiding long-ship is pulled from the coast of Norway into a war over a drowned god's shrine, where oath, blood-debt, and a king's betrayal decide whether he sails home as a thrall or a jarl.
London, 1888. Alfred Victor, a bankrupt printer's son scraping by as a dockworker, discovers a manuscript hidden in a crate of scrap paper. It teaches "Ink-Binding" - the art of writing contracts that, when signed, bind the soul. The ink itself becomes a weapon. The written word can kill.
In 1916, ambulance driver Millicent Passmore carries the wounded down from the Somme and writes every name she transports into a private notebook. When a dead man's name walks into her clearing station alive, she must trace a trade in stolen identities before it buries the truth, and her.
A water-clock keeper in Tang Chang'an finds the palace's seven jars dripping to a false hour, and traces the error to a recast spout, a forged almanac, and a poisoned secretary. To prove the clock was moved, she must risk the only work she has ever been allowed to hold.
A widowed illuminator finds the charter that keeps her fenland priory's land and mill has been scraped and rewritten. When she tries to prove it, lord and bishop dismiss a woman's testimony and name her the forger, and the price of being believed may be her writing hand.