On Thursday the charter Gilt Lark left the Lowfen dock with Table Amber set for twelve in the forward cabin. The sheet by the door called it an appreciation service. It was a negotiation for the winter exhibition date, the ice fee, and which club would take the Canterlot window in the first week of ice. The cake was already on the sideboard, under a gauze, before the ship cleared the harbor lamp.
Idris Keel, seventeen, the Lowfen winter-puck wing the other table had come to look at, sat at the galley joint. His card read "Featured — I. Keel." The joint is where the trolley brake meets the bench. The clear panel, the one window in the forward cabin left clear, had been written for him on the sheet. By the time the fish came out, that seat belonged to Tav Merrin, the patron's nephew, a passenger there for the window. Keel's water was the service water. It was refilled last.
Solace Merrin wore the soot-gilt travel coat, silver frogging, club pin on the left cuff. She had the head of Table Amber. Bram Oster, the captain and the pony the program called the honoree, wore the exhibition sash over a black ice coat and sat at her right, near the cake. The physic's chair, one past the trolley, stayed empty. Its card still read "H. Reede, Flight Physic." The Canterlot Regulatory Authority's charter rule, the one with Mareline Verdict's signature on the posted card, puts a physic within one row of any contracted minor. Hollis Reede had been walked up to the donors' end before the harbor lamp. His bag went with him. The row beside Keel stayed bare.
Lavender Bloom, a junior on a card that said only her name and the club, had the other half of the galley joint. She was close enough that the trolley touched her knee on the fish pass. She was the pony who saw his color change.
"He told me he was fine," Bloom said. "He says that when the brake hits him. Then he didn't say it."
The episode came after the fish and before the cake. Keel went quiet over the plate. He missed the question Oster had been passing down the table about ice time, and he slumped into the joint with his shoulder under the trolley rail. Ember Hearth, who had the cabin and the braking, was the first pony on her hooves.
"He went quiet over the plate," Hearth said. "I got the trolley off his shoulder before anypony in a sash stood up."
She loosened the collar of his club knit, kept his head off the rail, and called for Reede by name. The physic had to come back the length of Table Amber, past the gauze on the cake. The ship turned for Bracken Halt. A club aide met the stairs. Keel was conscious by the time they took him off, which the cabin treated as a kind of permission. The halt ward kept him for evaluation. The Lowfen statement, issued before the ship was level again, called it a medical episode, called the stop precautionary, and left the seating off the page.
Corin Hale of Eastreach had been put at the far end as the other club's eyes. He sat without a sash. He watched the nephew stay in the clear panel while the aide took the colt down.
"They wanted him in the room until the date was signed," Hale said. "The window was for the nephew. I don't know what they want now. The cake was already cut on the sheet."
Oster asked, before the ship left the halt, whether the exhibition date survived the diversion. Merrin nodded to the sideboard. The program, printed that morning and set at every place, gave her a spontaneous word at 9:40, between the fish and the sweet. The spontaneous word stayed on the paper. Hearth served the cake on the minute. She served the empty physic's chair out of habit, then took the plate back.
Keel stayed at the halt ward. Bloom stayed at the galley joint with his napkin, which Hearth had folded once and left. Hale left the date unsigned. The Gilt Lark completed the run into Canterlot with eleven covers and the honoree still in the sash.
Tav Merrin ate the cake in the window seat the sheet had printed for the colt.
