Crystal City's lower-ward polling hall held a hard freeze on Tuesday. The slate on the tables ran to sixty-one leaves and asked residents to set the course of the city, the Empire, and the realm.
The Environmental Compliance Board issued the packet under the name Next Steps. A notice on the door called it condensed. Southern advisors certified the wording in the morning and took their carriage out before the pencils were set down. Leaf one was their cover letter, which named the packet a conversation. Leaf sixty-one was a diagram of bunting hooks for the festival that had struck its poles at midday.
Between those leaves sat the Ember Scale, raised a half-notch for any hall that had hosted music, and a coal clause set in the small type. The paper was festival stock. A firm mark on the Scale bled through onto the coal clause three leaves later. Once the mark dried, the clause was a smear.
Clerk Tansey Holm has the hall, the lamps, and the oil locker. She trimmed the wick when the doors opened. At leaf nineteen the flame dropped and smoked the glass. The lamp is rated for a short reading. The Board's notice is silent on the rating. Holm's tally at the door, which she keeps because the Board's count comes on the Thursday post, showed the room arriving from the allotment line. Fourteen ponies still had ice packed in the frog of a hoof.
The Empire question, in the Board's long form, drew a sour room. The realm question drew worse. On the Board's posted sheet from last week, sixty-eight in a hundred Crystal City respondents said the Empire was pointed the wrong way, and seventy-one said the same of the realm. Sixty-four said a slate of this length would still be open when the supper bell rang. The sheet hangs beside the notice that calls the packet condensed.
Fuller Page, the advisor who signed the certification, filed from the platform while the train was taking on mail. "A generous slate is how a realm invites its ponies into the heading," he wrote. "Attention of that length is a kind of warmth." The copy reached the hall after he was past the ridge. Holm pinned it under the oil ledger.
Linden Ash keeps a furnace on the ward and has wintered here through six short rations. She read to the bled coal clause and set the pencil down flat. "I can say which way we are pointed," she said. "The bin locks at dusk. The Scale moves if there was music. I am not putting my mark on a leaf that turns a blank into a yes."
The covering of the Heart had been short, a visiting princess from the southern court having stood for the cloth and taken her carriage before the pencils went out. The allotment line was still moving when the poles came down. When the line released, the cart of poles was already pointed at the platform Page had used.
Holm had bought the second can out of the wick drawer when the glass smoked. "They drew the first can for a conversation," she said. "It lasted to leaf nineteen." Her authority stops at the lamps. The Board's junior seal sits on her desk for receipts. The senior seal went with the carriage.
At dusk the lower-ward bins locked on the posted allotment, a half-sack under last freeze. The hall stayed open. The instruction leaf allows a heading to be marked until the second bell. Ponies who reached the last page took a stub marked direction recorded. Holm had set out two hundred stubs. At the second bell, thirty-one were gone. The unfinished packets stood in a stack on the side table, higher than the finished stack by a head.
The Board will score an unfinished packet as an abstention, except on leaf forty-four, where a blank on the Scale counts as assent if the hall hosted the festival. The lower ward hosted it. Ash's packet was still under her hoof at the bell, the coal clause lost under the bled mark. The card on her stair's bin, locked for an hour, gave the week's weight as lighter than the packet on the table.
