At 09:12 the Notice Office of Westreed Hold posted Form K-7 on the cork board by the east stair. The form named eleven false gates. Two carried the levy crest. Three carried a paper's masthead. Six offered winter aid and a place in a roll. Clerk Dusty Verdict signed the foot. In the left margin, in pencil, he wrote "Kindness Survey, High Pale" and the hour the runner brought the card.
Westreed has kept the east fence against the High Pale since the frost campaign. The Pale holds the ridge. The Hold holds the windows and the levy. On Tuesday the warning went on the cork before it went near a throne. The Notice Office called the eleven gates copies. It tied them to the Kindness Survey. That is the listening shop that works for the Pale. It keeps a brass plate on a rented door.
The sixth gate called itself the Gazette of the Westreed Public. The real sheet is the Westreed Gazette, printed on Cooper Lane since the old ferry. The copy used the same type. Clover Margin, who keeps the receipt tape, put the wax under a lamp at 09:50. The rim held a smear of butter. The mold was a kitchen mold. Six hundred ponies had paid for the morning sheet under that seal since Sunday.
Marrow Pell, a carter from Mill Cot, found a levy desk at 05:40 on Bridle Lane. The Hold's levy window is on Cooper Lane. It opens at 08:00. The mare at the Bridle Lane desk took forty bits. She wrote a receipt on pale green paper. The receipt thanked Pell for his harmony. It spelled the Hold with an extra e. The crest matched the crest over Cooper Lane.
"I paid forty bits at a desk with the right crest and the wrong street," Pell said. "She said the crest was the part that counted. I kept the green slip. I want those bits on a real line in a real book."
Verdict read Form K-7 into the daybook at 09:14. He read line four aloud.
The line reads: "These gates are not the Hold. A sum paid at them is a sum paid to the copy."
"K-7 names eleven gates," Verdict said. "I posted it at 09:12. Line four is the working line. The margin names the Survey. The sheet can stand by itself."
The Harmony Desk in Canterlot issued Decree 14-B at 11:40. Princess Celestia's seal went on the lower right. The wax was the size of a saucer. The decree was one sentence. "All ponies are encouraged to practice discernment in channels of public address, in the spirit of harmony." The sentence spoke of channels and spirit. The eleven gates stayed on the cork in Westreed.
Under-secretary Linen Holt brought the decree down at 11:46. He held it by the top corner.
"The decree is the position," Holt said. "A list would crowd the seal. Discernment covers these gates and the next ones. The wording stays clean."
Bram Sallow, the levy captain, had cleared two oat vouchers on Monday against letters from the false desk. Those letters sit in the jacket behind Pell's green slip. The Harmony Desk has sent no runner.
Clover Margin closed the tape at 10:04. Since Sunday the false desks had taken 1,240 bits. The long line was a winter-aid registration at eighty bits a head. Forty-one heads. The sums moved to a counting loft the Pale rents over a dye shop on the east road.
"The tape has the sums and the hour," Margin said. "I wrote the dye-shop loft on the spool at 10:04. Any pony who wants the number can read the spool."
A Pale attaché at the ridge told the runner that listening shops do not print gazettes. He gave no name. He gave a card that offered "public clarity" and the dye-shop mailbox. Verdict pinned the card to K-7 at 13:10 and wrote the minute under the pencil note.
At 16:05 the Gazette of the Westreed Public reprinted Decree 14-B. The saucer seal sat under the sentence. The butter smear came through in the cut. The paper called the decree proof that its gates were sound, and it added five bits to the winter-roll fee. Form K-7 was still on the cork by the east stair, the only sheet in the building with the eleven gates written on it.
