Chapter 9 · free to read
Eleven hundred scraps. Ninety-four of them touched the seventh month.
Use them and the boy is flogged out of the Chancellery. Do not use them and four thousand piculs of grain stay burned.
Not a forgery. A copy of a copy, made in her own hand, attested by her own name — worth less in law than his, and worth everything in that it belonged to somebody who could survive being asked.
It was the first lie she ever told the Chancellery, and she told it by omission, in her own handwriting, and she was fifteen years old and she never once pretended to herself that it was not a lie.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.