The slate in the Canterlot Royal Gardens refreshed at dusk and again before the soup. The hedgerow on the river line did not move. Ponies called both refreshes news. Keeper Pellamy Voss hosted beneath it.
Baronet Hollis Drebb of Starkmere was the honoree, cited for a pause in the corrective presence his realm has kept on the Graywater bank since the maps thickened. His dress coat was moth-black wool, cut for a parade with nowhere to walk. The ribbon, a bar of ash silk called the Order of Measured Pause, was pinned before the first carriage. The program filed that pinning under Spontaneous Honors, between the lemon ice and a note that laughter would be welcome.
Table IV stood on the gravel side of the hedge, nearest the service door, under a lantern that smoked. Six cards, five chairs. The sixth card read Witness for the River Line and faced a glass no one filled. The Canterlot Regulatory Authority had marked the chair held. The program had marked a pony expected.
Envoy Nessa Pell of the Graywater Marches took the corner seat with her back to the slate. On Thursday the Authority told the kitchen to drop her from Table IV. The drop list called the card a duplication. Starkmere had filed her eastern parishes as returned pasture, and the Authority did not want the card arguing with the filing over the fish. At six the order reversed. Grain-wharf donors had reached the receiving line, and the card was to be restored.
Colm Ash, who keeps the sideboard, set the card and left it wet. The new face read Starkmere, Eastern Counties. The tacky back still read Graywater Marches, Envoy Nessa Pell. He turned the wet side to her hoof and set the gravy boat over the corner the dais could see, so the county could not be read by the ponies who had ordered it. The slight was two realms on one card, and the sauce picking which realm the room received.
"They told us at four to lose her," Ash said, counting spoons. "At six they said the chair had always been hers. I don't dry a name the guest can still smell."
Her clerk, Jory Fen, left before the fish. He stopped at the slate. The live line had swapped a Graywater parish for the words returned pasture and marked the hour unchanged. He told the door pony he would not stay to hear a parish applauded into someone else's ground. The log has him out at 8:11. The program had reserved 8:40 for an unscripted nod from the witness. The chair was empty at 8:40 and empty again when the cake came.
Lavender Bloom had Table II, in the clean light facing the dais. Her dress was a fitted lilac sheath with a silver wheat ear at the throat, lent by a house that insures the barges. She watched Table IV as a bidder watches a lot already declined.
"Table IV is where the evening stores what it will not pronounce," Bloom said. "An empty chair is not a slight. It is a pause with the seat saved, if the number comes in."
Pell shifted the gravy boat, read both faces, and slid the card under her hoof. "I sat what they printed," she said. "I do not answer to the county on the dry side."
A clerk from Drebb's suite reached to blot the back. Ash laid a napkin over that hoof and left it there. Drebb touched the ribbon as if it had surprised him. The printed order had called the touch unrehearsed. He did not turn it toward Table IV. The slate reported the presence unchanged.
Voss delivered the toast on its minute. It is not carried here. The laugh printed under it arrived on time.
From the service hedge, a junior of the Canterlot Economic Watchdog kept a second slate. The ice sculpture of the river had been billed to an account fed by Starkmere assets frozen three winters ago. Her note, sent before the lemon ice, said a frozen account may not buy ice, and that the invoice had been entered under hospitality.
Mareline Verdict, keeping a public roll and absent from the program, read the card, wrote in the margin, and told a page, at sideboard volume, that a turned card does not open a county and that Thursday's drop list was still on file.
Pell left her slice and took the card. She passed the slate and did not stop.
Ash entered the seating in the kitchen book under the tacky name. That book does not go to the printer. On the Authority's copy, Table IV ends at the empty glass.
