Nine Crowns for a Good Name

About this book

In the river city of Hesk, families make paper the old way and press their house-marks into every sheet. Sixteen-year-old Sefa Ilvaret is ashamed of her family's heron-marked mill and reads the conquerors' language better than anyone on Heron Weir. Then the Ardane Concord buys the city, and its heralds proclaim the Edict of Names: within a year, every household must take an Ardane surname. The rich can buy clean names. The poor get whatever a clerk decides to call them. Sefa talks her way into the Registry and learns exactly what a good name is worth. Told backward from the night the Great Roll of Names burns, this is the story of what a girl will sell to become someone else, and what it costs the people who still call her by her old name.