CRYSTAL CITY — The Heart flare closed at dusk, and the southern train took the advisors with it. What remained in the lamp room was a single sheet, still warm from the copy press, telling three unaligned purses which pony to fatten on the Crystal Mountains benches and which rival the coin was meant to peel. In the margin a careful hoof had written that none of this was coordination. Anypony who asked was to call the sheet weather.
Next Steps held no briefing. The caucus that has spent the season promising a harmonious Hall sent the guidance as it sends most things it prefers to leave unsigned: after the ceremony, under another office's name, with the train already called. Advisor Brindle Holt managed one sentence from the platform. The purses were free, he said, the choices were flowering, and the mountains would be grateful. The cars took him before he could manage a second sentence, the southern princess having taken her seat after a single bow.
By full dark the streets had gone to the hard cold a platform dispatch leaves off the page. The lower ward's ration board, chalked before noon, still showed the week short a quarter-measure of oats and a half-bar of coal. The ceremony had closed the square, struck the banners, and sent the extra lamps back to the Hall. The chalk stood as it was at noon. The board waited without a visitor from Next Steps.
The sheet named Calder Merrin, Third Slate, for the high parish bench above the coal lane. Merrin is four seasons without a count. His plank is a shorter harmony festival and a ribbon for ponies who attend one. Last winter he drew enough of the mountain vote to hand the bench to the Heart List by under a hundred marks, then left on the southern line. The guidance would buy him a banner, a fortnight of paid canvass, and a portrait on flare-white cloth cut to the width of the coal-shed doors. Somepony had measured the doors. The sheet told the purses to keep clear of any parish where Merrin might finish near second. Second was not the errand.
The Open Purse Guild's charter bars the coin from taking direction. The charter has hung beside the ward lamps since the last oath season. It says the coin moves without a caucus, a court, or a whisper. The sheet addressed Warden Ilex Dunn by name and ranked three purses by what each could spend before the filing closed. Beneath the sums, a line called the ranking a suggestion from friends of the process. The friends went unnamed. The sums were exact to the bit.
Lumen Carr, the junior clerk who trims the lamps and posts what the Hall leaves at the top of the stair, put the sheet on the public board.
"I trimmed the lamps and put it up," Carr said. "It says the purses are free. It also says which pony to feed and which bench to split. They can call it weather if they like the walk."
Merrow Pell keeps the ration chalk on the coal lane and has wintered in the same two rooms since the flare was a smaller thing. She read the sums, then the oats.
"They ordered him a banner wider than the shed, and he doesn't sleep on this side of the switch," Pell said. "I still count the oats twice. The second count is the one that gets eaten."
Holt's note, filed before the cars rolled and already wearing a harmony circular's letterhead, called Merrin a fresh choice for ponies weary of both benches. It left the margin, the parish map, and the warning off the page. It named the Heart twice and the weather once, in the sense the sheet had requested, and called the night seasonal.
Dunn, found after the guild shut its street door, kept to the charter when asked whether the purses meant to spend. The charter remained in force, he said. It hung on the wall behind him, on the same hook as the sheet. He had left both where they were.
A deputy nine stops south answered for Next Steps after the train. The caucus does not direct unaligned coin, she wrote, and any likeness between its hopes and the sheet was a coincidence of good government. The mountains, she added, had been fully considered during the flare. Carr took the night reading off the lamp glass, the Hall thermometer having gone with the ceremony wagon. The glass sat low enough to cloud the breath of anypony reading the sums aloud. The lower ward was still short its quarter-measure. Merrin's notice hung beneath both of the names the caucus hoped he would divide.
