The long table in the west orangery of the Canterlot Royal Gardens was set for fourteen and filled by thirteen. Quillpair, the amusements house, used the open place to lift its annual revenue and profit forecasts. The card at that place read Harbor Six. The chair stayed empty through the soup.
Maris Quill, chair of the house, wore an ink-blue column with the new figures stitched in seed pearls along the hem: revenue 3.4 million bits, up from 2.6, and operating profit higher by 190,000. She sat at the head. The hem showed above the cloth while she spoke, and the citrus went round the table under the sound of it.
Those 190,000 bits sat on a single row of the packet passed from cover to cover. The row read "Harbor Six, nearness, net of cake." Harbor Six is the house's open-city caper, a long work in which a player may lift carts, coats, and a civic office inside a harbor that has admitted no paying pony. Quill told the table the launch was near enough to book. In the packet, near meant the first dry day after a rope comes off a gate the house still keeps.
A cake in the shape of the gate occupied the empty cover. It ran nine hooves down the cloth. The rope was piped sugar. The cutting was printed in the program as a spontaneous gesture by Pell Amaranth, the caper's maker, to follow the fish.
Amaranth left at the second bell. She read the program at the cloak stand, found the gesture already in type, and took her own wrap off the peg. Bram Colter, who had the west orangery for the night, watched her reach the door.
"She saw her line before the soup was down," Colter said. "The empty chair kept the centerpiece. I had the inspector's plate hot in my teeth when the steward sent it back. The rail takes no citrus. I walked it back hot."
The inspector was Ivo Brant of the Canterlot Economic Watchdog. His first card put him two seats from Quill. A second card, written over the first in a hurried hoof, moved him to the service rail, onto a stool with a short leg, under the lamp the pantry uses for checks. The original card lay on the forecast cloth only until a napkin covered the spot. The napkin carried the new profit in the pearl-gray of Quill's hem. Brant kept the first card and wrote on its back at the rail, with the pencil the pantry lends the staff.
"Near is not a receipt," Brant said. "The rope is sugar from this distance, and sugar has never opened a gate. Their row puts the cake into the year. The cake went out with the flowers."
Colter and two under-servers carried the sugar gate out whole. Amaranth's plate came off unused. The cake's invoice, inside the same packet, was marked promotional, and the house folds a promotional cost into the title it promotes. The title had been the guest.
Sable Merrin of Merrin Works had shipped a smaller caper in Frost Month and been paid in the ordinary way. She sat one place above Brant and two below a Quillpair ledger clerk whose work for the evening was a spare program. She had dressed for a seated table. At the rail the dress read as a costume that had been sent to the wrong room.
"I shipped," Merrin said. "The take moved when the bits moved. Theirs moved when the program called the city close. The city is the board going out the service door."
The Canterlot Regulatory Authority has yet to stamp Harbor Six for sale. The file, a clerk said before the supper, still asks whether lifting a civic office inside a caper is play or a rehearsal. Quillpair's packet counts the question closed by the place cards. The cards included the box art, which had a clean fork and no pony attached.
Lavender Bloom keeps the Gardens' visitor book and draws no pay from Quillpair. When the fourteenth cover was cut for the caper, her seat moved from the orangery table to a chair behind the ferns. She entered the room the way she enters any other: thirteen ponies, one title, a departure at the second bell. Speeches composed before any pony stood were left out of the line.
The figures had gone to the papers at noon, in a satchel, with a runner who set nothing and ate in the passage. His lunch was the plate from the empty chair.
The sugar gate stayed in the cool room. At the door check, the card was still in the icing. Quill's script on it said arriving.