The idea of an ink mage is so cool. Literally everything else about this book is garbage.

There is misogyny dripping from every page -- the male mage is a wizened old man, the female mage is young and gorgeous and naked. A deserter from the army finds a cosy job at a brothel where the hottest prostitute falls madly in love with him. A stable boy is desired by both the brilliant and competent gypsy girl (I hate even typing that word because it's so racist, but that's literally the word used over and over) and the ink mage duchess and bangs both of them. The duchess sends her cousin off to help her get support and he sleeps with an unattractive woman to get her father's help, and not one person calls him out for being a piece of shit.

Worse than all this to me is that the author claims a PhD in English in his bio, yet manages to spell his own characters names wrong, misused solider for soldier twice in one page, and had more grammatical errors than I could count. My personal favorite was "ready to spit death in the eye" which frankly makes even less sense than the fact that I finished this book.