Excerpt from The Otherwhere Post by Emily J. Taylor, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Would you look at this. Old Byrne has announced that the backlog of letters from the months after the Written Doors burned are finally being sent out. My sister wrote me from Barrow some twenty times all those years ago. Wouldn't it be something to get her letters now?"

"Without a doubt." At least Maeve knew that none of those old letters were for her.

"It's good the Post finally sorted out their disastrous infrastructure. God knew how hard it was for Byrne to find enough couriers he could teach to scribe. I heard it's one in a hundred that can pull off the magic."

It was one in three hundred, but she didn't correct him. The talk of scriptomancy caused her palms to sweat.

He flipped the page. "One of these days, I'd like to see exactly how scriptomancy works."
"It would be a sight to behold," she said, hoping Mr. Braithwaite would drop it. Already, images of her father with a quill between his fingers poured across her mind.

Scriptomancy is the art of enchanting any piece of existing handwriting, from a penned novel to a scribbled grocery list, he always told her with a twinkle in his eye. He was a skilled scriptomancer, and had promised to teach her the art "one day soon," whatever that had meant. Then he'd given her journals and asked her to fill them, said that scriptomancy required a deep understanding of linguistics and chirography before you were ever allowed to practice. She'd listened fiercely because she'd loved him more than anything in the worlds. Things had certainly changed.

Maeve shoved her father from her mind and set about carving quills. A few minutes passed, and the shop grew strangely silent. Mr. Braithwaite hadn't made another peep. It was unlike him. Worried something had happened, she turned to find him regarding her with a bewildered frown.

"What did I do now?" She hadn't cracked a feather or spilled any ink. The front counter was as neat as a pin.

"You're leaving in a week."

"Yes, I know. We discussed it yesterday."

His expression turned grim. "I won't be able to replace you, and I don't like it."

"Sure you will. You'll hire a brawny stock boy who likes to smile and can name more parchment substrates than I can."

"They won't be half as capable."

"That's utter nonsense." She had neat writing, certainly, and ­above-­average organization, but she couldn't upsell a customer to save her life. She always tried, though, rather awkwardly.

"Ill-­tempered as you may be, you have no idea of the treasure you are to me."

A treasure? Maeve glanced at his worktable to make sure he hadn't accidentally inhaled anything, but there were no uncorked solvents.

He called her a treasure, but the reality was, she was a liability. Her father's legacy made sure of that.

Her eyes dropped to the fine blue veins threading the inside of her wrist. She often wondered if the potential for murder was passed through blood, if evil lurked inside of her now. Even if it didn't, she was still a risk to Mr. Braithwaite. Her father's crimes were so disgraceful that everyone in Leyland had reason to hate him. If anyone discovered her identity, this shop would be tainted by association, and nobody would come in. Mr. Braithwaite would lose the shop, the flat above it, even the shirt on his back, and it would be her fault for not quitting sooner. The past eight months had already been too long.

The front door opened, and the grocer's wife, Mrs. Findlay, bustled inside with a steaming loaf for Mr. Braithwaite tucked beneath her homespun cloak. She dusted a drop of rainwater from the tip of her pink nose. Her inquisitive eyes pierced Maeve. "Ah, Isla. I spotted you from my shop window running in late. Did something happen?"

Excerpted from The Otherwhere Post by Emily J. Taylor. Copyright © 2025 by Emily J. Taylor. Excerpted by permission of G.P. Putnam's Sons. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.