Nine thousand bits. The figure sits on the second line of a Second Roof Desk notice that Nell Harrow has kept under the oat scale since Monday, where she can see it and the customers cannot. It is due before the first frost collection. It names a cottage on Lower Switch Lane in Halver March. Halver March has been inside the fighting for three seasons. The notice calls the cottage habitable.
Harrow keeps the feed stall on Ponyville's west lane. After oats, rent, and the Saturday wage, the stall cleared 11,200 bits last year. The levy would take most of that. She bought the cottage eleven seasons ago for 4,200 bits from a cousin who left the parish for kiln work. Four rooms, a cellar, a trough, and four apple trees. She used the place six nights a year. The road in closed during the second spring of the fighting. The key is in a jar by the twine.
"I can pay for the oats," Harrow said. "I cannot pay nine thousand for a lane the carts will not take, and I will not say the trees are fine because the box is still ticked."
The desk accepts that the road is closed. Rook Calder, deputy assessor for second roofs, said the cottage remains on the habitable schedule, and the habitable schedule is what the levy bills. The rate for a second leisure roof in that band is 9,000 bits for the season. Staying away, he said, is not an exemption. Ponies stay away from roofs for all sorts of reasons, he said, and the desk does not sort them.
"We bill the line," Calder said. "Unpleasant conditions are not a category. Open one, and every second roof with a hard winter will ask for the same pen."
The form does offer a relief, and only one. A roof removed by recognized weather can come off the leisure rate. The list printed on the back of Harrow's notice names hail, flood, slide, and excessive festive wind. Strikes on a parish, when they are written down at all, go in as neighbor activity. Neighbor activity leaves the number where it was. Harrow sent the march medic corps' lane log. It records seventeen strikes on Lower Switch since winter and says the cottage roof is now in the orchard. The log came back with a blue stamp reading "not a roof document." The amenity line for the trees still says present, bearing, 180 bits.
Page three carries the lien. If the 9,000 is unpaid after the frost collection, the desk may attach the payer's primary trading counter up to the sum due. Harrow's primary trading counter is the feed stall on the west lane. The cottage is not in the town that would take it. The stall is.
She wrote to ask if she could sign the cottage off the roll and back to the parish. The reply, filed under the same scale as the notice, says a voluntary exit from the leisure schedule counts as a disposal. A disposal inside the first fourteen seasons brings its own charge. Hers would be 1,400 bits. The 9,000 for this season would still stand, because the cottage was on the roll at the assessment date. The assessment date was the third of last month. The medic log, the one the stamp refused, shows a strike on Lower Switch that morning.
Of the 9,000, the desk's own breakdown holds back 1,100 bits for the pooled amenity chest. Ponyville's spring draw on that chest is a canopy order for the main lane, marked out of Mayor Pippin Pines's office and placed in summer. The order stops at the main lane. Calder, asked how a parish inside the fighting feeds a canopy chest, said the pool is not reckoned parish by parish. He has not been to Halver March. The assessment photo on file still shows the apple trees upright and the trough full of water.
Harrow has not opened a file with a scroll-clerk. The rate posted outside the clerks' hall is 80 bits to start. That is the Saturday wage she pays twice over, at 14 bits for the day plus the extra hours when the delivery is late. "Two Saturdays to have a pony read the word weather to me," she said. "The mash comes first."
The desk's window for amendments closes at dusk on the frost collection. Harrow's winter oat order, written in this week every year since she took the stall, has no date on it. The notice does.
