On Thursday, at the Keel Table under the east glass of the Canterlot Royal Gardens, Vane Ordnance and Maren Lines took joint title to Lowmere Yard. The cake was a dry dock in sugar. Dame Corbel Vane cut the hull. Ivo Maren took the cranes. The gate piece stayed on the platter. The chair it faced was empty.
The table was set for nine. Eight ponies sat. Dame Vane wore slate silk closed with nine brass rivets and a gorget collar that clicked when she turned her head. Maren wore a captain's coat over a counting-house collar, the braid newer than the cloth. Minister Pellin Ash of the Saltmarch Harbor Board sat between them in harbor green, a sash across his chest with the word partnership woven through it in gold thread. His welcome stood on page two of the program, the minute already in type, under the heading Impromptu.
The ninth card, at the Minister's left, read Local Yard. Beneath, in the small face used for florists, it read see program. The program placed Nim Lowberth, master shipwright at Lowmere, in the acknowledgments, between Lavender Bloom and the quartet. Lavender Bloom had dressed the lilacs and the Keel Table both. She told the cloakroom the empty chair had drawn the fresher spray.
Lowberth sat at Table 14, called the Fern, behind a lilac screen with a view of the coat pegs. His card read and accompanying. He left before the cake. He lifted his own coat off the peg.
"The card was right enough," Nim Lowberth said, already buttoned. "I accompanied that yard for thirty years. The peg is where they put a pony when the title has already moved."
Sedge Quinn, night welder and voice of the Lowmere bench, had a chair at the Keel Table and no name on it. Ember Hearth, who served that table, set his glass and left it clear.
"You pour for a pony," Ember Hearth said, taking the fish plates away on one hoof. "That glass stays clear. If they wanted him here, the card would have had a name I can say out loud."
The transfer itself runs shorter than the menu. Vane Ordnance, which sells ram-plates, civic armor, and doors to ponies who can pay for doors, takes the military berth, the armor shed, and the even days on the dock. Maren Lines, whose holds already move more eastern freight than the Harbor Board prints in its cheerful totals, takes the cranes, the commercial slip, and the odd days. The gate is shared. A hull that is a guard barge on Tuesday and a stack of jam crates on Wednesday will sit on both books until somepony with a stamp decides otherwise. Lowmere remains the only yard on the Saltmarch able to lift a keel longer than a parade float.
A clerk at the garden door had the figure the Keel Table left inside its folder. Sixty-two million bits. Four million of that sat in a column headed Goodwill. The Canterlot Regulatory Authority stamped the joint title routine at four in the afternoon, early enough for the program to list the stamp among the evening's surprises.
Rook Halden of Halden Ways had bid for the dock in winter. The Harbor Board answered that the yard wanted a broader partnership. On Thursday he sat one seat nearer the door than Lowberth, which at the Fern is a rank you can measure with a hoof and still go home untitled. He watched the sugar hull travel up the room on a silver board.
"They bought the lift," Rook Halden said. "The Minister bought the quartet and the minute for his welcome. Both bills will clear before the month does. Only the lift knows the weight of a keel."
Under the Minister's saucer lay a six-line note from the Canterlot Economic Watchdog, signed by Mareline Verdict, which did not make the circuit of the table. The fifth line said the cranes would answer to two outside books. The sixth said the night shift had not been asked. When Minister Ash rose, he shifted the saucer. The note took a ring of tea and stayed where the cups are cleared from.
The clasp came at the minute printed beside Clasp, unrehearsed. Dame Vane offered a hoof. Maren offered a hoof. The Minister offered both of his to a handshake already finished. The quartet played the short tune marked optional. Down behind the lilacs, the screen hid the Keel Table and left the pegs in plain view. Lowberth was on the path by then.
Ember Hearth boxed the gate slice, wrote Sedge Quinn on the lid in kitchen pencil, and set the box on the empty chair beside the clear glass. The program's last line thanked the staff for making the evening look unplanned.
