The quarterly bench levy posted to Ponyville on Monday at 184 bits, up from 121. Between vellum and travel, a new line read "public clarification, local share, 9 bits."
Elsie Marron keeps the orchard books on the west road. She set the notice beside the feed invoice and a 14-bit hinge chit from Hearthstone Smithy, already stamped paid. "I can pay a court," she said. "I want to know which one, the one that hears the case or the one that tells me it does not lean."
Senior Magistrate Orlan Pike of the Crown Bench issued the clarification on Friday. A river assessment on cut timber sits before him. North Cut Charter wants it struck. The assessment is 2 bits a cord at the lower boom. Pike wrote that he has no side in the matter. "A gate banner is linen," the clarification said. "A friend is a friend. I am not a rented bench." He will not step off Thursday's list.
The banner is a storm flag, flown reversed at his manor during the spring quarrel over that assessment. His wife, Nella Pike, has said the reversing was hers. Pike has said he did not note it. The courtesy book logged the cloth as "gate linen, turned for drying," with no bit entered. Neighbors on the manor road said it faced the lane for eleven days.
North Cut's courtesy account shows twelve nights at High Cedar Lodge in late summer, 640 bits, guest line "O. Pike and party." The charter's petition reached the Crown Bench on the ninth day of the stay. Pike's disclosure form lists the trip as "private hospitality, no matter pending." The petition's date stamp and the lodge folio disagree by a week. The form was not amended. A boat on the folio is entered as "water familiarization." The admiralty docket belongs to another magistrate. The river named in the petition is the river under the boat.
Harl Dunn, factor for North Cut, paid the roof. "We did not purchase a magistrate," he said. "We kept a friend out of the rain and filed the way any charter files. If the town wants a cheaper friend, it can price one."
The Crown assesses the bench levy by hearth and posts the share to the town book. Mayor Pippin Pines sent the notice on to the usual counters with no added line. His office confirmed the 9-bit share. A clerk at the town desk said the copying had been ordered from Canterlot as a public record. The town paid to receive the pages that said the pages were unnecessary.
Pellam Shore, chair of the Bench Courtesy Committee, called the lodge an atmosphere. In a note on the quarterly roll he wrote that hospitality "deepens the field in which judging occurs" and that questions about sides "risk a coarsening." The note passed over the date stamp. The committee's own line inside the levy rose 30 bits this quarter for "tone."
The clarification ran four pages. Two said a spouse's banner is speech and that speech at a gate stays out of the record. One said the friendship with the factor is older than the petition. The last said the request that he step aside came from "parties with a taste for theater." He named no party. The copying fee treated all four pages as one notice. On the disclosure form, the question about gifts over 40 bits is answered "none in connection with any matter." The committee keeps the 640-bit lodge in the courtesy account and off the gift line. Pike took the rooms, the meals, and the boat.
Marron's orchard floats no timber. It pays the town when the town is assessed for the bench that hears the floaters. The lower boom's spring tally listed North Cut as the largest sender. Dunn signed the sheet. Marron said she would pay the 184 bits on the twelfth, because a late town share can be folded into a household's standing with the ditch wardens, and her ditch uses the Crown's rate tables. "The warden does not write four pages," she said. "He writes a line, and the line sticks."
Thursday's list shows the river assessment third, magistrate of record Orlan Pike. The town's 184 bits are due that morning. The 9-bit line is already in the town book. High Cedar's folio still names the guest. The form still says no matter was pending.
