An Orphan's Confession (The Scars & Copper Trilogy)

Aerendrel is to be hanged for the work of a man whose name is not on the indictment — and in the days he has left, he means to set down the whole truth where no court can edit it.His confession begins where everything began: with a fence dead on the floor of his own shop, a brass button picked up off the boards without thinking, and a young thief who did not yet understand that he had just been chosen. A spymaster had selected him the way other men select tools — for usefulness, and for the fact that an orphan with no family and no connections leaves no one behind to dispute the record of how he is used.What follows is the account of how an orphan became a blade. The lockpick trade of a port-city underworld. The forged documents and quiet killings of a network that did not exist on paper. The boarding fights, the marsh channels, the long con of a life lived in an other's service. And, against all of Aerendrel's intentions, the few people who slipped past his defenses anyway — a fence's grieving lover with a warhammer in her hands, a girl he taught to write her own name, an Admiralty captain who let her tea go cold — as he came slowly to understand that the blood on his hands ran, every drop of it, back up a chain to a single hand that was never meant to answer for it.He is not asking to be forgiven. He is telling the truth, in full, in his own voice, because he has decided that the truth told whole is the one thing his enemies cannot take from him.An Orphan's Confession is the first book of Scars and Copper, a literary fantasy trilogy of thief-craft and intrigue, accountability and mercy — and of what it costs to tell the whole truth with a rope already waiting at the end of it. Read more