Nell Garrick, from the roads crew, had the mop in the east aisle of Reed Hall before the gavel, working a gray smear the survey crew had walked in from the fairgrounds. Hay from the morning market still stuck to the gallery rail. On the clerk's table the incentive packet stood a hoof and a half high, and on top of it sat a cream pamphlet with a rising sun and the title Every Forge Is a Friend.
Silver Hoof waited until the chamber was quiet enough to hear the mop bucket, then read the pamphlet into the minutes. The Realm Incentive Board required a friendship report before any grant of this size. Luna Starlight's voice came through the appendix on a thin recording, warm and unrushed, the way a pony sounds when the room she is blessing is in another county. She told Reed County that a furnace shared across a border was a furnace kept, and that the Third District had been selected because its ponies already understood welcome.
The vote followed the recording. It passed 4-3. Councillor Winn Bracken supplied the fourth. The Third District has changed hooves in each of the last four counts, twice by fewer than two hundred votes. Bracken's office had sent the fairgrounds map around before breakfast.
What the board approved is a plate mill on those fairgrounds, chartered to Voss Plate, a griffon firm of the Aerie, and owned there for forty years. Reed County and the realm will put up 640 million bits: a rail spur, a power spur, a twenty-year abatement, and a paved apron of slag the company quarries, ships, and sells back to the county at nine bits a hod. The jobs exhibit, prepared by Rarity Hoof, promises 740 places. On the exhibit's number, the incentive comes to a little under 865,000 bits a place, before the hods.
Maren Voss, managing partner, stood in the back in a travel coat still buckled from the crossing and did not applaud the pamphlet.
"We will own the mill," she said. "The lesson is your paperwork. We did not bid on the lesson."
Luna Starlight, reached at a studio in Las Pegasus between two recordings, said the objection mistook the assignment. "If the district is still counting bits," she said, "the district has not begun."
The pamphlet runs twelve pages. Page nine lists the old county plate shop as a "partner in spirit" and thanks it for the lesson of making room. The shop sits on the spur the new line will take. Its Tuesday crew is fourteen ponies. None of them is named in the report.
Ember Flint has had that Tuesday shift for eleven years. She shoes the roads team's scrapers when the mill work is slow, which is most months since the realm orders started going to larger forges. After the vote she came down from the gallery, past the mop, and stood at the clerk's table. The approval generates a form. The form wants the shop, and the shop had sent her.
The form is called a Transition of Craft. It asks the displaced shop to describe what it has learned.
Tess Quill slid it across. She had already initialed the slag schedule, forty-one pages, including the line that asks whether the imported hods have been greeted on arrival. She had written "dry."
"They can call the spur a welcome," Ember Flint said. "I need the Tuesday shift. The Tuesday shift answers to a desk in the Aerie now."
Quill did not look up from the stamp. "Page forty-one wanted a feeling," she said. "I gave it the condition of the metal."
Silver Hoof told the gallery the county had purchased a posture, with furnaces attached, and that the posture would be reviewed on a five-year friendship audit. The audit will be written by the same office that wrote the pamphlet. Bracken called the payroll a conversation the district could finally hear back from. He left the hod price for the written record.
Outside, the survey flags on the fairgrounds had blown flat. Garrick finished the aisle, wrung the mop, and signed the work chit Quill had left on the bucket: one hour, chamber floor, slag-colored. Ember Flint took the Transition of Craft home in her saddlebag. The pamphlet stayed in the minutes. The first slag invoice is due before the footings are dug, and Quill's basket already has a place for it.
