The Civic Fold redrew eleven speaking wards on Thursday night in the Canterlot Royal Gardens, with a grease pencil and the crack that runs the length of Table Seven. The Canterlot Regulatory Authority stamped the linen before the icing set. Ward Nineteen, under that stamp, held a punch bowl, two ferns, and a chair empty since the second pour.
Dame Corris Vane billed the supper as a courtesy to the new benches. The place cards were cut to the new lines before the doors opened at seven. Pellam Row, floor chair of the Fold and the evening's honoree, wore a pale wheat coat with eleven ward pins along the left lapel. His card sat at the center of Table Seven, on the dry side of the crack. The program scheduled a spontaneous remark for 9:40 and printed the beat where he was to pause.
Mareline Verdict's card lay face-down under a water goblet at the service end, where the hedge draft comes through the kitchen door. The magistrate signs challenges to the Authority's ward sheets. The cushion from her chair had gone to Row's. She turned the card over, read her own name, and sat, the Kept Line's old map folded under her hoof.
Lavender Bloom wore a dusk-lilac court coat, the old ward pins sewn inside the left cuff, hidden from the door list and plain to any pony across the crack. The morning chart had seated her with the Fold. By the soup the line had moved, and her plate sat with the Kept. She ate with the cuff turned out, which saved the silk from the icing and let the pins show.
Soren Quill, chief whip of the Kept Line, left while the bowls were being cleared. His chair stayed, name card upright, wine poured to the mark ordered for a guest who was staying through cake. For two seasons he had called the old wards a riverbed. On Thursday the riverbed was a pencil mark that stopped at his chair and started again past the ferns. He went out through the hedge door between courses.
Ives Harlow stayed. He is the Kept Line's map chair and had drawn a fair share of the lines now erased on the linen. Vane's steward put him one place off the crack, with his plate in Ward Nineteen and his water glass in Ward Four. He left both where the line had split them.
"They sent a courtesy and redrew my street into a corridor," Harlow said. "I counted the chairs. The count is the rude part."
Ember Hearth, nine seasons on the Gardens staff, lifted Quill's unused plate. The steward told her to reset it for the new mathematics and to leave Verdict in the draft, and his book listed the magistrate among ponies who preferred the quiet. The book had been printed on Wednesday in the same type as the remark set for 9:40. Verdict had given him no such sentence.
Hearth worked Table Seven with the tray on her left shoulder and the linen under her right hoof. The Authority's clerk had lost the stand meant to hold the map when the flowers came down. "They told me the crack was the boundary," Hearth said. "The crack has been there since the elm came down. They said that made it traditional, and traditional is easier to stamp."
The benches had turned on Tuesday. The Fold took them by a margin the Kept Line's own counters had filed, six days earlier, as a thin tail on a long sheet. Row's clerks sent the pencil lines to the Authority before the Gardens clocks were set for company. Tamsin Moor, on the stamp, wrote in the margin that three of the eleven wards failed to touch unless the service corridor counted as a road. A second hoof wrote "road" across the note. Moor initialed the sheet. A refusal has to be spoken in the hall, and the hall was already set with cake knives.
Row reached his pause at 9:40. Vane's glass was up at 9:41. Hearth kept the cake plates moving and stepped over the linen where it had slid toward the draft.
At dawn the Authority clerks copied the sheet. The word "road" had blotted into the ward number beside it. Icing had striped the fern on the stamp's left edge. Scraping it would have lifted the number, so the fern stayed in the record. Verdict's challenge rode in the same pouch, written at the service table on the back of her place card, her name left showing on the front.
Quill's office said after midnight that the Kept Line would contest every boundary drawn at a supper.
"The card has my name," Verdict said, still at the service end, the goblet ring wet on the card's corner. "The seat they printed does not."
