The mountain holds of the Crystal Mountains asked the Thirty-First Sitting on Tuesday to raise the bits set aside for living through winter. The Environmental Compliance Board answered by entering the Crystal Heart as a stove. The entry values the Heart's seasonal brightening at 4.6 million bits of adaptation already delivered. Useful heat from that brightening ends forty paces past the festival arch. The first house on the lower stair is four miles beyond the arch.
At Lower Switch the morning reading was minus eighteen. Sable Holt's ration book allows three scoops of oats and one coal brick a household. The brick is cast for a stove the previous pledge was supposed to replace.
The Sitting opened in Crystal City with a reception that ran past the hour the mountain depot accepts receipts. When the reception ended, clerks closed the quarter's adaptation window with it, the ribbon already cut by a visiting princess who took the evening train. The window reopens when the Sitting files a fresh timetable. The timetable, as printed, follows the window.
A dispatch filed from the platform called the adaptation purse boosted. The boost is a reclassification. Of the 4.8 million bits named at the Thirtieth, the Board's entry books 4.6 million as the Heart. The holds took delivery of the remaining 200,000 bits: four banners still in festival wrap, a crystal lens billed as a public warmth perception device, and seals for an orientation yet to be given a date. The reception was itemized at 210,000 bits. Coal and lamp oil for the 220 households on the lower stair, at 48 bits a week across eighteen hard weeks, come to 190,080 bits before grain.
Holt said the hold had sent the same request after the last three Sittings and had received, in order, a banner, a lens, and a letter acknowledging the banner. "Three scoops and a brick is the week," Holt said. "The brick is gone by second watch if you cook. We are asking for the coal that was written down."
The Board's reply, read into the afternoon session, said the holds had mistaken the unit. Under the Ember Scale a release is due only when a seven-day mean rises past four. The Scale takes that mean from the square in Crystal City, which has sat at one since the Heart was polished for the reception. Lower Switch posted past four on twenty-two of the last thirty nights. Averaged with the square, the filing came back for insufficient anomaly. Other parties hold the weather roster and the Heart. The note said warmth is warmth regardless of origin.
Southern advisors attached to the Sitting offered an advance on next year's high-pasture timber, repayable in bits before the thaw, through a southern bank. The timber is under nine feet of snow. The road that would move it opens after the thaw. The ration book lists oats and coal.
Clerk Ivo Pell has the night duty on the nine lamps of the lower run. Three are dark. The work order says to wait for the tranche, and the tranche posted on the depot door is the lens. "They sent Next Steps," Pell said. "Six pages and a seal. It will hold a door. It will not go in a lamp." Pell has been feeding the wicks with kitchen fat since the first night under minus ten. The fat comes out of the ration.
Deputy Convenor Maris Quill told the Sitting the holds were welcome to share in the Heart's surplus and recommended a harmony orientation in Crystal City when the trains resume. The trains resume when the crew shed at the pass has coal. The shed stands on Pell's dark stretch. Quill's office is on the square. Asked who had carried a thermometer the forty paces past the arch, Quill said that measurement was not in the spirit of the week.
On Tuesday night the lower stair read minus eighteen again. Holt marked the brick spent. The Board's sheet for the same hour still placed the stair inside the Heart's delivery, at one. Coal comes due at four.
Pell walked the lower run after second watch with the fat tin half empty and the three dark lamps still dark. The work order on the depot door had gained a second page overnight, a correction that moved the lens from public warmth perception device to ceremonial optic and left the coal line blank. Holt copied the blank into the ration book beside the spent brick.
The Sitting's afternoon note had already gone out on the evening train. It thanked the holds for their patience and listed the Heart's delivery as current through the week. The lower stair's sheet for Wednesday morning was not in the packet. Pell said the fat would last two nights if nobody cooked.
