The Counterfeit Decree: A Sorethel Novel

Vare authenticates documents. Paper, ink, wax, script - he reads their material truth the way other people read words, and in fourteen years at the Archive he has never once been wrong about whether a thing is genuine. Then a land grant passes his bench that is perfect in every fibre and false in every fact, and Vare begins to pull the thread: documents substituted after he signs them, reports altered in channels he cannot see, a committee forging the past one flawless sheet at a time - and using his certainty as their cover. To expose it he must become what he has spent his life detecting. The cost, as the Conservation Principle promises, comes due in the one currency he cannot counterfeit: the ability to believe his own eyes. A quiet, exacting tragedy about authenticity, institutions, and what it costs to learn that genuine is only ever a word someone signed.