CANTERLOT — The slate silk had no train. It had one glass button at the throat, and when Consort Ivelle Maren sat, the lining showed a stitched latch in a darker slate, small as a coin. She sat at Table Eleven in the Canterlot Royal Gardens, nearest the service door, where the charger was chipped and the pear dish sat low enough to see over. The chair at Chancellor Corrin Hale's right stayed empty. The pony who left early was Osric Fen, at 8:38. He had been promised the remarks that would sound unplanned.
The supper was called a reconciliation and printed as one. Two nights earlier the Mid-Canvass turned fourteen benches of the Canterlot Regulatory Authority. Hale's household kept the gavel and lost the committee that decides who stands in front of a room. The court circular On Thursday, locked on Wednesday, carried the line in the same column as the menu: "Surprise appearance, Consort Maren, 8:40, with the lemon ice."
Mareline Verdict had been put behind a potted fern at the turn of the service lane, close enough to smell the sugar and too far to be introduced. Her place card for the high table was in the morning booklet. By dusk the high-table linen showed a bare rectangle. A card in another hoof's writing, Ivelle's name, held Table Eleven down with a spoon. Verdict did not move when the horns started. She folded her napkin into the rectangle she had arrived with.
"They put me where the trays turn," Verdict said. "You hear the promises from there. The fern did the work of a wall. It had the roots to prove it."
Ember Hearth poured water into a kitchen glass because the consort had asked for one. The crystal at Table Eleven stayed inverted. Hearth's cuff card, issued at three, listed the consort as absent and the high-table right as Verdict. A second card came on a tray while the ice was dished.
"She wanted the chair by the door and the glass we use when a cup breaks," Hearth said. "Neither was on the first card. The second card was warm. Somebody dried the ink under a lamp."
What remained of Hale's count wanted to be seen near a calm face. The new bench-holders wanted to know if the household would still return a note. Ivelle stayed with the chipped charger. She broke a roll, spoke to Verdict through the fern, and left the lemon ice as Hearth had set it, one scoop, the spoon unturned. Daven Kite, honoree for "an evening of steadiness," lifted his glass from the high table toward Table Eleven. She moved her charger two inches. The fern took the gesture. She buttered the roll.
Lavender Bloom had the chair everypony watches, three down from Hale, with a speaking-slip in her purse. The slip began, "We did not expect you." Bloom stayed seated.
"I wrote a welcome for a pony who stays in Whitlatch House and sends a wreath," Bloom said. "She sent herself and sat by the door. The welcome is still in the purse. It does not fit a service table."
Hale's remarks ran under the heading "Words Found in the Moment," long enough for the ice to slump. Fen was already past the gate. A groom said the deputy had remembered a wheel. The wheel had been checked that afternoon and found round.
Kite's place card took a ring of water when his glass came down. Table Eleven let the water ring stand. Hearth refilled the kitchen glass without being asked and set the reprinted card by the pear dish, face down.
Whitlatch House had been dark on the public side since the Frost Review. Hale had called the quiet a preference. After fourteen benches the preference had an hour, and the hour was the booklet's. The same page told the garden to wear "easy colors, as if among friends." The slate silk kept a color of its own.
Verdict stayed for the cake, a low orchard stack with the center already gone so the top would look whole. She ate none. Two deputies from the new benches stopped at the fern and addressed the leaves. Hearth kept what they had said to the leaves.
"The slices were cut before anypony sat," Hearth said. "We kept them level in the cold room. At eight-forty we only had to remember which plate went where."
On Thursday's late sheet, already stacked by the garden steps when the lamps dropped, thanked Chancellor Hale for an evening he had only just thought to hold.
