CANTERLOT — The Old Standard caucus brought its closing argument to the west hedge of the Canterlot Royal Gardens on Thursday and turned, on the mark, to deliver it. Table Nine stood under the pear trees, one setting short of the fountain, and had been laid for the twelve votes that keep a majority balanced on a fork. The pass sent a cream card in the heavy type the kitchen uses when a sentence must outlast sauce. It read: "If the ledger bores you, look at the other end." Harlan Breech, the caucus floor pony, wore a soot-blue sheath open at the left hip, with silver thread worked into a ballot notch. He said the line. He showed the notch. The program listed the moment as an unscripted peroration and timed it for 9:40. The cards had been waiting in the pass since four.
The chair at Breech's left stayed empty. The place card on it still carried the sentence the printers were told on Wednesday to kill: a plain ask for the twelve, and for the tally Ness Brown was walking over from Vetch's ward. Brown left between the fish and the cake. The cape stayed on the rail. From the fountain, if a pony declined to check the shoulders, the chair could pass for filled. Pellam Sconce, eleven seasons on the west-hedge pass, lifted the cape at half past nine, shook a crumb of icing from the lining, and put it back.
"They plated the cheeks before the soup went out," Sconce said. "Four o'clock. I read one card. A booklet was on the tray, and the sentence was already in it, with the star they print when a remark is supposed to look as if it just occurred to somepony. I kept the soup moving. The star is somebody else's work."
Lavender Bloom had the far arc, where the hedge draft settles and the steward's plan marked her second rank. She saw the hip, the notch, and the empty shoulders, and she did not clap. The slight was the cake. Bloom's slice, the plain crust the kitchen makes for ponies who mean to eat it, went to the honoree. Dame Pella Frost, credited in the program with steadiness, received the piece iced in the same sentence as the card and laughed in the pause the star had saved. She did not look at the chair.
"That thread was sewn, not pinned," Bloom said. "Nopony sews a surprise on the afternoon of a supper. They sew it when the booklet is already at the binder. They put me where I could watch the turn and not be handed a pencil. The draft is only weather. The card they gave me was a choice."
Holcomb Quill, the host, had his toast under a heading of its own. Table Nine stayed with the plates. Across the hedge, at the long table that faces the way out, Rowan Pell watched the notch the way a counter watches a scale told to bow.
"They needed twelve ponies to sit through the cake," Pell said. "They booked a cheek. I can walk that line onto a doorstep before the sitting. I would rather have had the twelve still in the chairs. Icing is not an entry in a count."
Quill's office sent a note after the pears were taken. The turn had been a gift, the note said, and the laugh was proof the majority was easy in its skin. Frost's aide said the dame had been moved by the honor and the icing. Neither came back to Table Nine. Brown was at the gate, asking a lamplighter if the ward count had posted. It had not. Under the star, in the small type kept for donors, the program said the peroration was spontaneous and was to be kept.
The cape was on the chair when the cloth came up. Under the empty plate Sconce found a second copy of the plain card, the twelve written out by name. The cheek card had been laid over it. He folded the plain copy into his apron. The iced sentence went out with the scraps.
Sconce left the plain card on the pass for the morning count, the twelve names face up beside the soup spoons. A junior steward came for Quill's copy and went back up the hedge with an empty tray. The chairs from under the pears were stacked by the fountain, and the cape went into the lost box under a tag that read unclaimed.
