The Envoy Table will take Packet Nineteen at the fourth hour on Third Day. The room is Concord Hall, west rail. The form is C-19, a ban list against the Ash March. The chair's note went out at dusk. It calls the vote "a showing of hooves in order."
Eleven seats are marked ready. Dunharth is marked ready once Schedule C is read aloud. The note is one page. The packet runs 214 pages. The seal on the noon copy is dry.
Clover Margin, clerk of the packet desk, set that copy on the rail at the second hour. She logged the seal at yesterday's noon. The vote line still says four.
"The form calls the measure major, complete, and binding," Margin said. "I counted the binding lines. Buttons take four. The coal that may still move takes forty."
Page 190 forbids parade buttons, classes three through five, and a winter tea listed as march leaf. A class-four button is a brass disk with a crown nick. Page 191 is Schedule C. It lets Dunharth receive seam coal of Ash March origin "in volumes up to the average of the three prior seasons, for eighteen months, renewable by note of the seat." Her side column puts that average at four fifths of the Ash March goods that crossed Concord water last year.
Glad Accord, Seal Reader to the crown, spoke at the third hour in the front court. He read the preamble. He read a letter from the crown desk. Page 191 stayed in the folder.
"This is the hour harmony draws the hard line," Accord said. "History will see the seal."
The crown letter names the preamble and the seal. It calls the packet "a bright stand in a dim season." The stamp on the letter is wider than the stamp on Form C-19.
Wynn Harth, envoy of Dunharth, stayed in the seat office. His clerk sent six lines to the chair before the first hour. "Dunharth will lift its hoof when Schedule C is read as written. A changed line is a different packet." The chair's answer adopts the six lines and thanks Harth for his "continued fidelity to the common measure." The answer is timed at the first hour and six minutes.
Hess Briar filed a petitioner's sheet at the Notice Office at the second hour. He keeps three barges on the south wharf. The sheet is one page, the length the office takes before noon without a fee.
"I read page 190," Briar said. "Class-four buttons are in my hold. March leaf is in the second crate. A seat gets a schedule. I got a stamp that says received."
The Notice Office routed the sheet to the packet desk. The Fourth Hour list names the envoys, the clerk, the Seal Reader, and a water pitcher. Briar may stand in the side corridor. His pass expires at the fifth hour. Margin tied a red string on his sheet. On that desk, a red string means the petitioner met the hour. The folder stays off the table.
The button ban takes effect at midnight after the hooves. Margin's tally puts last year's button-and-tea trade at 12,000 bits. The seam coal under Schedule C ran past 40 million bits on the same tally. Both figures sit in her column on page 2. Page 1 still reads "major."
Harbor Desk No. 2 cleared the barge Ormond at yesterday's noon on a Schedule C slip. The slip cites Packet Nineteen. The status line at that hour read "set for the fourth hour, Third Day." The harbor copy treats "set" as leave to sail. Margin marked the slip "consistent with the seal." The seal was dry when Ormond cast off.
Accord's office sent a note at half past two today. The note calls the clearance "consistent with the vote to come." Ormond was past the south mark before the note was copied. Her manifest uses the schedule's words: seam coal, Ash March origin, customary volume. The harbor master filed it under trade.
The chair will read the preamble first. That reading gets six minutes. The rest of the packet gets two. A hoof raised during the preamble counts for every page. The chair wrote the rule on the docket, under the hour.
Margin will sit at the rail with the noon copy. Briar will stand in the corridor until the fifth hour. His buttons will still be in the hold at midnight, when the ban makes them a violation.
The clerk's last line in the rail log is the count. Four lines bind the buttons. Forty lines let the coal move. The cover sheet still reads major.
