The night rate on the barley barn at Mill Race is fourteen bits. Overtime for a Westfold ballot clerk is nine. The Seat's Office of Oaths sent its sequester letter at dusk with a signature, a seal, and no line for either number.
The letter ordered the Westfold counties to pull and lock every ballot cast by an "unsworn" hoof before the canvass closed. Unsworn, as the office wrote it, meant a resident the capital had not entered on the subject roll. Three causes were attached: ribbon absent, ribbon foreign, or ribbon not yet affirmed. Affirmation would come by return post. The return post was not in the envelope.
A Westfold ballot is a card in a plain sleeve. The sleeve carries the marks and nothing about where a pony was born. Birth and subject-status sit on the roll, in another room, in ink that stays there. Clerks were told to match a capital list to the poll book, lift those sleeves, and lock them unread. Opening a sleeve breaks the count. Leaving it in the box refuses the Seat. The list ran forty pages and was titled Schedule C. The last page said Schedule C was indicative, not exhaustive, and was not a list.
Lower Mill files the market towns, Ponyville among them. It began with the names Schedule C actually gave, then met the beige. Beige is the ordinary Westfold ribbon. A print run in three precincts had left the ribbon column empty, and empty paper dries that color. Clerk Tansy Holt matched the names she could. The letter said an incomplete separation would be taken as refusal. She crated the undecided sleeves with the matched ones. Twelve hundred sleeves went into cider crates before midnight. Seal tape is capital stock, paid by a different bureau. Holt labeled the crates in charcoal.
"I can lock a crate," Holt said. "I cannot see through it. I will not sign a payer the Seat left empty."
She entered the night on the sheet. A guard at six bits. The barn at fourteen. Her overtime at nine, and two clerks kept past the whistle at the same nine. She invoiced Lower Mill. Lower Mill invoiced Keeper Sable Voss. His desk wrote "refer to Seat" in an unsigned margin. The letter had called the cost a matter for local arrangement.
Voss told the counties to comply to the extent the sleeve allows. He asked the Seat which entry it would accept by Friday. The reply congratulated the Westfold on its partnership and left Friday off the page. He read it twice and set a paperweight on it.
Bramble Yew, at the greengrocer stall on Mill Race, heard her name off the barn chalk before the lunch bell. She was born in a ferry town the roll files as river-foreign until a second stamp. The stamp is two bits. She paid in March. It is in a drawer in the roll room. Her sleeve is in crate three.
"I have the receipt in the till," Yew said. "If that is not a subject, they should tell me what they sold me."
Harlan Moss paid his poll-penny from the squash money and waited forty minutes at his precinct. His box had gone on the wagon with the beige. The sleeve was a subject sleeve. It shared the crate. "Return the penny or return the box," Moss said. "I don't sell squash as a maybe."
Pell Umber, for the Office of Oaths, called the order a partnership in roll integrity and said a hold was not a fee. "We asked them to set the ballots aside," Umber said. "A barn is a local choice. The Seat does not rent barns." Clerks who felt rattled, he said, could attend a voluntary alignment in the capital. He named no date. The road, he noted, was not a Seat expense.
The Westfold Rolls Board booked the assembly room for eighty bits, set a ribbon vendor under refreshments, and sent the notice upstairs. Holt was not on it. The notice called the evening a chance to synergize the sequester. The questions line under that sentence was blank.
Two letters followed before noon. One forbade counting the sequestered sleeves. One forbade a late certificate. A late certificate holds the county rail subsidy, which Lower Mill has already assigned to culverts. A third note, half a page, told the clerks to keep situational awareness of the holding. The guard has a stool. He can see the crates. An account number is still off his paper.
The barn owner billed the fourteen bits to Holt's office by name. A seal, he told her runner, is not an account. She pinned the bill to the nail over the blank payer line. The fourteen bits are due in the morning. The line is still blank.
