Glyphs & Merit (The Glyphwright Chronicles, #5)

Six weeks without Felix was supposed to be the hardest part of the season. Then the mayor walked into the shop with a problem the town had already failed to solve four times.

With Felix away and Erasmus at the capital, Marcus Fairwind is running the shop alone. He expected a quiet stretch of routine commissions and a partner home by month's end. Instead, Mayor Weatherby arrives with a district that has gone twelve years without hot water and a budget smaller than the boiler it can't afford.

The town has voted the replacement down four times. Marcus thinks Millbrook has been solving the wrong problem. The right one is a utility that serves every house on the line at once, and nobody in the region has ever built one.

Then a Senior Inspector asks him to take two apprentices on trial, and the Guild sends a board inspector to decide whether a shop this young has any business teaching anyone. Marcus has spent two years learning the craft. Now he has sixty days to prove he can explain it — while a quiet campaign against the mayor gathers somewhere he can't see.

The Glyphwright Chronicles continues with civic infrastructure, first apprentices, small-town politics, one long-postponed question, and the lesson that the hardest part of mastering a craft is teaching it to someone else.

Pour yourself something warm, settle into your favorite reading spot, and discover that the work nobody sees is the work holding the whole town up.