In Canterlot, the Day Court called a golden age at 11:00. The Grant Desk had closed the quarter at 10:41.
Princess Celestia read Harmony Decree 440 from the low stair. The decree ran four lines. The lines named a Gilded Season of Making. The sum line was blank. The bench line was blank. Orvil Gloss, court herald, held the gilt copy level with his shoulder. The border on the copy cost 86 bits. The print slip was clipped to the back.
Form 19-C was already in the West Annex drawer. Clover Margin, clerk of the Grant Desk, had stamped it at 10:41. The form cut the crown bench fund to a wick-and-wax line of 40 bits. Three labs were listed. Clover added a fourth in the margin. The pony from that lab had reached the window while the stamp was still wet.
"The quarter is zero for glass, pay, and new work," Clover Margin said. "Forty bits remain for wicks. I wrote the hour on the form. The form is the record."
Survey Glass was the third lab. At 9:12 Reed Sallow, the bench lead, filed Form 7 at the Exit Window on the Third Stair. The form is a departure notice. Sallow marked the calipers and the good lens as her own tools. She left the crown nameplate on the counter.
"I filed before they read anything," Sallow said. "The speech does not buy glass. The bench past the east gate pays on the first."
By 10:30 Nel Stamp, clerk at the Exit Window, had twenty-nine Form 7s from crown labs. She stacked them face up and called the next number. Her tally showed twenty-nine out and four in. The four were transfers from a shuttered annex. She underlined them and wrote "not arrivals."
Gloss read a second page after the decree. It listed fourteen new benches. He said the list was the season. Clover Margin's ledger showed fourteen brass plates, ordered Tuesday from an engraver in Manehattan, at 210 bits. Each plate had a title and an empty name-line. Eleven name-lines were empty when the crate arrived on Wednesday. The ponies named for those benches were already on Stamp's Monday and Tuesday slips. Form 19-C still listed 40 bits for wicks.
"The season is open," Celestia said, at 11:06. "The decree is the work of the morning."
She left by the side door at 11:18.
Harp Quinn reached the Grant Desk at 11:52 with Form 12. He holds the crown survey contract. The form asked for six bits of silvered glass. Clover Margin turned it over and showed the 10:41 stamp.
"You can still file," Clover said. "The yes closed at 10:41. Take the stamped copy. You will want it when somepony asks why the glass stopped."
Quinn took the copy. He said he would finish the survey lens from his own stock and send the bill to a closed quarter. On the Third Stair, Stamp gave him Form 7-B for contractors. Nineteen of those sat in a second stack. He took one.
At 12:05, in the hall, Gloss stopped for two court reporters.
"Empty benches are capacity," Gloss said. "A golden age starts with room."
A reporter offered the figure from the Exit Window. Gloss held up the gilt copy and called the number unfinished. Stamp's stack remained on the Third Stair.
Decree 440's fourth line authorized a seal, a reading, and a season. Before noon Clover Margin wrote in the margin, "No sum named. Cut stands."
At 3:00 the court posted the gilt notice on the west board, over the upper half of Form 19-C. Annex rules leave a cut on that board the same day it is stamped. The stamp, the hour, and the 40-bit line showed below the pin.
Stamp kept the window open until 4:10. Eight more Form 7s came in after the posting. One was from the pony hired to seat the brass plates. In the space for his next employer he wrote "not the plates."
Sallow's key hung in the Survey Glass door. Eleven plates stood in the crate in the hall, titles up, names blank. At 4:30 Clover Margin locked the Grant Desk, set Decree 440 under Form 19-C, and left the hour written on both.
At 4:41 Nel Stamp closed the Exit Window. She wrote the day's total on the tally card: thirty-seven out, four transfers. None of the thirty-seven had a name on a brass plate.
She pinned the card to the stair rail. Annex rules keep a tally up until the next opening.
Clover Margin had already copied her last line onto the card: "No sum named. Cut stands."
