PEARWOOD COURT, Canterlot — On Thursday the permitted Lantern Mile procession reached the east gallery at the hour on page one. The looters reached the shops four minutes earlier.
The march had a route and a reason. The Canterlot Regulatory Authority had set a night-shutter fee on any front open past the late bell. Glaziers and night clerks who would pay it walked under a white permit, the turns marked in pencil. The program expected them to finish in the gallery. There, Minister-President Lior Vesper would receive their delegate at Table One, and Consul Maren Pell, the line said, would be honored for steadiness in civic hours. The gallery hour was the one the Authority had posted for an objection before the fee locked.
Table One was the pearwood oval under the east lanterns, set for fourteen. Thirteen places held ponies. The fourteenth card read Civic Voice. The napkin stood in a fan. The fork lay against a line a pony had drawn and then wiped. The chair stayed empty.
Pell wore a pewter silk column. The fee schedule ran down the left seam in seed pearls, each rate small enough to pass for beading. She sat at Vesper's right. The pearls at the four-percent line caught the chair join. A maid pinned the loose thread before the lemon ice and did not take the pin back.
Ember Hearth carried the procession's speaking card and did not find her name on the oval. The card was on an overturned crate in the service corridor, between the ice well and the spare trays, right side up. The crate was not on the morning diagram. She looked at the corridor, kept her coat on, and left at the lemon ice. The remarks had not started.
Pellam Ash, on the east gallery service, took Table One a stand of sugar roses cut for the honor course. The corridor tray was the cardboard round from under that cake, on a silver plate, with one fork.
"The slip said base only, Hearth, corridor," Ash said. "Table One was roses. I read it twice. It had a time."
At the third turning, unbadged ponies left the procession with pry bars. They took the night shutters off two jewelers and a glove counter and cleared the cases. A sideboard cake stand left with them. The Authority's clerk marked the stand uncounted. Ash had it on his list at seven. The permit holders kept the pencil route and came into a gallery already short a stand.
Vesper spoke at 9:40. That was the minute printed next to Spontaneous Remark, between the lemon ice and the string trio, in a type larger than the courses. He said there was no room for violence. He said it to the oval. The fourteenth chair took no one while he said it. The toast under the remark was given after. Glasses touched. The corridor was empty by then, and the crate had one plate on it.
Mareline Verdict sat with the Authority against the west wall, near enough to read type and off the oval. She had come for the fee's wording. Verdict's card put her at the wall. The program's honor line named Pell.
"They set the spontaneous line bigger than the courses," Verdict said. "You could read it from the corridor. That chair was empty because the card was moved. I watched the crate come in at six."
Lavender Bloom, who keeps the court's flower book, had been told at noon to dress the fourteenth place with a low white spray and to keep the spray off every other table. The spray was still wired to the chair when the trio began. Out on the mile, the Canterlot Economic Watchdog's first loss note went up before midnight and came down again, the clerk writing that a cake stand might be returned and should not be totaled twice. The night-shutter fee stayed on the books for the first of the month.
At dawn Pell's seam was in the coatroom, pearls stopped where the maid's pin held them. The Civic Voice card lay under the pin. Ash's slip was on the kitchen spike. The time on the slip was 9:38.
The objection the march had come to enter closed with the gallery hour. No clerk called Hearth. The night-shutter fee took its date on the first, and the book showed no voice against it.
Ash put a second slip on the spike before the breakfast trays. The corridor plate was marked returned. The roses were marked served. Beside place fourteen he wrote the setting he had actually laid. He wrote crate.
