The wool showed up first. Reed March coats came down the Saltmere airship stair in a heat that had already stuck the dock crew's manes flat, and the Circuit party behind them had dressed for a photograph and a different month. Halven Crowe waited under the Coral House awning in a linen sash and sent the arrival toward Cabana Four. A slate by the steps listed the noon splash show, then the talks, then the four o'clock splash show. Somepony had written Friendship Twelve in the middle slot and underlined it twice.
Ness Bramble had chalked the underline. She had the forms desk that week, and the mop whenever the floor captain was out on the promenade with the painters. Pink foam from the noon cue still sat in the tile grooves. A Reed March attaché set a hoof in it, felt the slide, and went on. The foam dried on the fetlock in the shape of a small cloud. The linen party walked around the cloud.
Cabana Four had lost its extra chairs. The drinks table stayed. The war map of the Reed March lay across it, corners held by menu clips, and a fourteen-bit sample glass stood on the east sheet. The paper umbrella threw a round shadow on the crossing marked in the night. Wind off the water lifted any free page. Crowe wanted weights that already belonged to the drinks service. Bramble brought the clips.
He opened with the cabana, one hoof on a chair that still wore a damp towel. The Sun Chair had it for three days. He thanked the Reed March for the distance, the Circuit for the company, and Bracken, absent from the cabana, for a listening he described only by its result.
"If the room can share an hour, the ground will learn the hour," he said.
Friendship Twelve occupied the space in the program between the welcome and the citrus. Crowe read it from a thin booklet, pale cover, same words as the slate. Any party that had crossed weather to sit, he said, had completed the difficult clause, which was the consent to be seen sitting. Bracken had been included by channel. The channel was a closed wire in a basket under the table, a napkin over the basket. The booklet's last line, in a larger face, said the border would follow the chairs.
Dame Sera Quill nodded on that line. She had come with three Circuit ministers and a single paragraph they meant to say in the same order. Their flight note, still damp, lay on Bramble's blotter: the publics at home were to receive the awning before any sentence about withdrawals. Quill used the voice she would use a minute later for the citrus.
"The arrival is the part they can trust today," she said. "The clauses can catch the later editions."
Ivo Marsh kept his coat on. The dried foam sat under the cuff like a pale crust. He had four pages on the crossings and a wire card that ignored the cabana's clock. A crest painter waved him toward the pool, clear of the umbrella. He put the fourth page down beside the glass and watched the round shadow leave the river.
"Leave the pen on the page that still changes," Marsh said. "Mine changed while we were over the water."
Crowe thanked him and called for towels.
Bramble had been told to keep Marsh's fourth page out of the welcome packets until the painters lost the light. She kept it in a plain folder under the forms book. The folder had no number.
At the half hour a flute ran the fountain cue, and mist speckled the east sheet. Protocol lifted the map. Bramble toweled the paper, the tile, and a Circuit aide's fetlock. The bucket smelled of oranges and hot stone. The floor captain, passing, said the mist would read as sparkle from upwind.
"I can get the water up," Bramble said. "The schedule keeps putting it back."
The aide heard her.
By late day Quill and the Circuit seats had signed the booklet covers. Crowe signed in dark ink and initialed Marsh's margin with the pale pen from the sash. Marsh signed the fourth page and left the booklet shut. Bramble logged the names under the heading used for guests at the end of a stay.
The evening wire came in while Cabana Four practiced a short bow for the painters who had missed the stair. Marsh's aides read it on their hooves. The crossing under the umbrella's old shadow was in Bracken's hold at the hour Crowe finished. One column in the day book was still open. Bramble entered that hour beside the names of the ponies who had landed.
