The south-gate board at the Ponyville rink still had the seats at 36 bits on Thursday morning. The chalk was fresh where a hoof had wiped the opponent. In its place, in a smaller hand, someone had written "option pending." Bramble Quill had already paid 80 bits for the cider pitch under that board. The cinnamon was in the tin. The kettle was on the cart.
The Bench of Sporting Settlement ordered the Realm Rink Compact to reinstate Northglass before the Solstice Cup draw. Magistrate Ilex Bram signed the order on Monday. It runs one page. The line that matters is short enough to read while a kettle heats: the bar shall end. The seal was still warm when the Compact's clerk logged it Tuesday under incoming weather.
On Wednesday the Compact answered in public. Officials were considering options. Clerk-Commissioner Auden Voss moved the considering to the High Cedar Lodge and paid the lodge in advance. The bill was 9,400 bits. It covered a long table, a night's lamps, and twelve trays from Cucumber & Quorum. The agenda listed one document, Pathways Toward a Considered Forthwith.
The document runs forty pages. Option one is to comply. Option two is to comply after the draw, so the Cup can be filled first. The later options arrive at a proposal to let Northglass skate in a month the calendar has not named. Northglass is in the title. In the body the realm is "the affected skating interest."
Northglass has been off Compact ice for three seasons, barred after the Gray Crossing. The Bench found that a blanket bar had run past the Compact's own rule on eligibility, and that the squad is to be drawn into the Cup. The same post brought letters from Cedar March and the Low Reaches. Both wrote that their teams will stay in the barn if Northglass takes a faceoff. Voss has called the letters a climate. Host rinks sell tickets against a named opponent. The price on the south-gate board was a name with a number beside it.
"We honor the Bench, fully and at once in spirit," Voss told reporters at the lodge door. "What we are doing now is stress-testing a menu of compliant futures. Synergy with the calendar is the project."
Quill heard it from a colt selling the evening sheet and stayed with the cart. "I paid eighty bits to stand here and pour for whoever shows up," she said. "If the menu is the product, the menu can buy the cinnamon. I already did."
The invoices under the menu are plainer. The Hearthstone Smithy forged twenty-two sets of visiting blades on a Compact work order. Harl Ember, who keeps the smithy's book, priced the lot at 640 bits and dated it Friday. On Thursday a clerk stamped the work order "pending option" and left the due date where Ember had put it.
"They ordered steel and I made steel," Ember said. "Friday is on the invoice because I wrote Friday. Six hundred and forty bits is the number under it. A lodge leaves the number where it is."
Sable Dunn keeps the south ice from dusk until the surface is fit to sell. Three Northglass nights sit on her rota at 14 bits an hour. Kept whole, the nights come to 168 bits. The hours are still written. The wage line beside them is blank. She said she would scrape the ice and would like the line filled with a number.
Ponyville Property Pros holds the rink lease. Merret Cole sent the month's note while the chalk was still wet. "The dates are reserved, and a reservation is what we sell," Cole said. "We collect on the first. Considering leaves nothing I can enter in the book."
Mayor Pippin Pines has 1,200 bits of welcome bunting in a cupboard off the main corridor, bought from the seasonal hosting fund for the exhibition weekend. He said the bunting can come out "if the weekend keeps any name at all." The overtime estimate for three nights of security remains 300 bits, still on the page.
The Compact's 9,400 bits left on Wednesday and is marked paid. Ember's 640 bits is marked due on Friday. Dunn's line for 168 bits is blank. The forty-page menu was received into the weather file before dusk.
