A Rope to Nobody

About this book

In Ravnik, every piece of amber pulled from the drowned forest passes through the Amber Hall, where seventy houses own the lamps, the prices, and the Register — the book of names kept for two hundred years. No dredger has ever been written in it. Milda Kovar is seventeen, paid by weight like her grandmother before her, and she can do what the Hall's masters only claim to do: hear what a piece of amber holds. When an old master offers to teach her, she learns the one rule money cannot move — to be named, you must prove a named line, and her people have never been more than a figure on a weigh-slip. Then an enemy fleet closes the mouth of the bay, and the Hall needs amber far more than it needs the truth. How much would you risk to be written down?