The book

Pell grows up in Hana's shop on the coast. Nothing leaves her bench until its price is stamped on a strip and turned to face the room. He learns spoken workings one word at a time, and the bill is always in plain view. A second word kills the first and closes the throat. A hard working leaves the voice thin. Locking your pulse takes the time straight off the end of your life. When the kind clerk at the guild desk stamps a shallow cave with a "pest" in it, his father goes in and does not come out, and the desk will not restamp the sheet. So Pell writes the true line himself and hangs it facing out.

Between the ages of eight and twelve, a crew gathers around that line. Brask is a badger-folk child who stands in lane mouths and cave mouths and will not take thanks. Omber is a dwarf smith who burns a thumb on purpose to learn a heat. Yez is an ash-gray child with a too-clean pack and a smooth story that never names its gate.

This is a warm, clear-eyed coming-of-age fantasy. It is about prices said out loud, friendship built from shared work, and what a child decides to spend when the grown-ups' paper is wrong.

Read the opening

The shop was already hot when Pell came down in the morning, and nobody had spoken a word to make it so.

He stopped on the third step, partly because the third step always creaked and partly because the heat came up through the wood there, as if the stair had been left too long beside the forge and had never quite forgiven it. Then he counted the rest of the way down. There were eight steps. Pell was eight. The numbers matched, which pleased him in a small, private way that he kept to himself, since it was not the sort of thing that helped anybody do a job.

Hana stood at the bench with her back to the stair. In her left hand she held a pair of tongs, and in the tongs, over the cradle, was a short bar of iron glowing a dull and patient red. Behind her the forge mouth was banked down to a grumble, and no fresh coal showed in it. That meant she had put the heat into the metal before he was awake, and she had done it without saying a single word, which was exactly the kind of thing Hana did and never explained.

"List," she said, to the bar.

"I'm here," said Pell.

"I know," said Hana. "List."

In the shop, a list meant the steps of a job said out loud and in their proper order, before anybody's hands were trusted with them. Pell liked lists. A list stayed where you put it, which was more than could be said for most things in the world.

Back-cover copy

Pell is eight and knows the rules of Hana's shop. Every working has a price, stamped on a strip that faces out. A second word kills the first and closes your throat. Gray hair on a young porter is the bill for locking a pulse. And a boy who doesn't know the way out of a cave waits at the gate.

So Pell waits. He runs messages to the guild desk, earns a Copper stamp, and learns one word for light, one for stone, and a ten-heartbeat lock he can never take back. Then the desk stamps a shallow cave with a "pest" in it. His father goes in, and the rope goes slack.

The pest was the size of a door. The desk won't restamp the sheet. In the kit that comes back with his father is a cracked knife whose strip names its price: one memory.

Pell hangs his own copy of the truth by the shop door, and a crew gathers around it. Brask will not leave a cave mouth. Omber burns a thumb on purpose to learn a heat. Yez is an ash-gray child with a too-clean pack and a story that won't say which gate.

But not every path the desk sells is empty. At the end of one, someone is already waiting.

The Size of a Door

Reading order

The book

Read the opening

Back-cover copy

Portraits

Package

Continue the series, or inquire with the desk.