The Yard Slate's port-ward committee opened Firstday with 214 bits on the literature line. The figure is still on the page. A pencil runs through it. Beneath the strike, in the grounds office's hand, is a charge of 1,860 bits for a speaking green, supper capacity, and lamp oil. The committee's own book shows no reservation under its name.
High Reeve Calder Voss reserved the green. He is spending the mid-assembly weeks in the Amber March, where the Harbor List holds the ports, the town wards, and the shade, and the Yard Slate holds a scatter of inland fences plus two dock seats it wins by talking about prices. Voss described the trip as help. On the grounds form, a civic address is 40 bits. A crowd with banners and a meal is a festival. His advance pony, Jory Fleck, checked the festival box. He then signed the payer line three times, once for each committee he had decided would be grateful, and varied the spelling so the marks could be filed as three agreements.
"A crowd that size is a festival whether the form sulks or not," Fleck said, and left the carbon on the spike.
"The rate is printed on the back of the form," said Osric Bell, the grounds clerk who keeps the spike. "Supper for six hundred is the line that includes supper for six hundred. The realm has its own window. That window was closed."
Mara Quill is the Yard candidate in Port Ward Seven. For nine weeks she has talked about the wheel fee the Harbor List set at the dock: 4 bits a wheel on any cart without a Harbor ribbon. Shopkeepers along the weigh-lane can repeat the four from memory. Quill had ordered 800 door cards at Brass Quoin, front side only, with the fee and the hour she stands by the scale. Fleck paid the shop for the reverse before her proof came back. The reverse carries a woodcut of Voss and the line THEY COUNTED YOUR RAIN, a grievance about an eastern levy. The dock has no rain levy. The canal took that argument with it years ago. Brass Quoin ran both sides as one job. In the margin a clerk wrote a bundle rate and labeled the discount synergy.
Quill's volunteers folded the woodcut inward. The fold lasted as far as the saddlebags. By Secondday the rain side faced out in windows over the late pears, taped beneath Quill's name, which had been set in larger type on the fee side and now read as a caption for his face.
"I can explain four bits," Quill said. "A face on the back of my card, from a pony who never got to four, takes longer. The printer was paid. The leaflet account paid him. That account was the literature line."
She spent the hour of the address at the dock, where the carts are weighed. The Amber March Campaign Board called it a prior commitment. A sketch artist sent by a Harbor paper drew the empty stretch of rail, priced the drawing at 3 bits, and sold the stack by supper. Quill's committee later found the drawing clipped to Bell's bill, in case the packet needed a picture.
Inland, the arithmetic runs the other way. Ivo Brent wants the Dry Bend seat, and Dry Bend still fills a green when Voss points at it. Brent stood near enough to the horn section to show up in the cheap woodcuts and far enough from the platform to say he had been asked to count chairs. He clapped after a passage about the Salt Compact. He kept his hooves still after a line that called a neighboring grower a thief of shares. That grower sells fruit to three of Brent's donors, on terms written on a card Brent carries in the same pocket as his talking points.
"Every pony who has looked at a bill is welcome in this campaign," Brent said. Asked whether the High Reeve was welcome on the platform, he said the platform had a weight limit. Fleck had already set a piano on it. The invoice lists the piano under morale. The piano tuner, who came at the civic rate and stayed into the festival hours, told Bell he would bill the difference to whoever had signed a name he could read. He is still choosing among the three spellings.
Tansy Pell keeps twelve rows past Dry Bend. Her water-share bill is 86 bits, due the same Firstday the chant sheets went out free to ponies who had not asked for chants. She listened from the road. The road sits outside the festival boundary, so Bell's office leaves it off the plan. Voss spoke forty minutes. He spoke about the eastern seal, about taking the season, and about a harbor in a march that ships timber and buys none of her fruit. Eighty-six did not come up. Four did not come up.
"He can keep the cheering," Pell said. "Cheering leaves at sundown. The share bill is on the counter when I get home. If this visit brings the inspectors down my lane, the bill can leave with the bunting. I grow fruit on twelve rows. A grounds crew is somebody else's season."
The campaign board, which is paid to keep the Yard Slate upright in public, sent one page before sundown. The page thanked Voss for his energy, praised a synergy of voice and venue, and left the payer blank. Its only figure was a suggested length for the chant. Quill's packet that evening held the page, Bell's assessment, and the Brass Quoin margin, in that order, tied with Harbor-colored string the print shop had on hand.
Harbor candidates stayed off the grass. Governor Pella Rowan kept to the capital ward. A junior clerk with a measuring tape confirmed the green had been used, wrote down the bunting lengths, and caught the evening cart. The Harbor List already holds the shade in Port Ward Seven. A visiting reeve and a woodcut finish the job on a bill the List will never be asked to open. Rowan's office called the day lively. Sella Varn, who keeps the Slate's March books, has no column headed lively, and she declined to start one.
On Thirdday each of the three committees was assessed 620 bits. Fleck sent a note behind the assessments. The High Reeve, the note said, considered the sum a gift the committees would understand later. Varn pinned the note beside the pencil strike. The gift column stayed empty, because a gift with a due date is a bill, and she already has a page for bills.
Quill's third came out of what remained of the leaflet budget after Brass Quoin. Brent's Dry Bend fund paid his share under the mark turnout, which moved 620 bits from a donor who had been told the money would buy chair paint for the ward hall. The third assessment went past the canal, to the fence ward of Nelda Cray. From the platform Voss had introduced her as the mare from the other orchard. Cray has won that seat twice, both times by enough to skip a recount. She sent the bill back with her name spelled the way the ballot spells it. The money is still in her lockbox. The map tacked to the platform had put her trees on the wrong side of the water, in a ward the Harbor List has held since the canal.
Port Ward Seven's literature line is a strike, a festival third, and a remainder too small for another card at Brass Quoin. Pell's share bill is still 86 bits on the counter. The chant sheets, which arrived free, did not itemize it.
