Copper Measure posted an oat sack at eleven bits on Tuesday evening and a ribbon spool at fourteen, after a spend lattice scored an ear twitch as a want. The morning slate had the oats at eight. The ribbon had not been lifted.
The lattice is Shop Want No. 6, built under a shop-charm grant at the Equestrian Trade Council and set on the lower-market till in late spring. It reads three marks off the counter glass: how long a hoof rests near a tag, whether an ear turns toward a neighboring peg, and whether the coin tray draws a pause. Past a set mark it writes an anticipated line and moves the unit price along a table the council calls the courtesy curve. A pause of one breath adds one bit. An ear turn toward a peg opens that peg's cheapest item as a line already checked.
Pell Amaranth was the evening till. She said the oat customer, Mallow Keene, had come in for the sack and had set it on the board. A foal's cart bell rang in the aisle by the ribbon peg. Keene's left ear turned. The lattice marked the turn at a count of two and opened the ribbon line before Keene looked back.
"She was buying oats," Amaranth said. "The bell was not hers. I saw the ear go, and then the slip had a spool on it."
The price on the oats moved from eight to eleven while Keene was reading the first total. Amaranth put a hoof on the void. Shop Want No. 6 allows a void only inside a spoken count of four, measured from the moment the anticipated line posts. The count is kept by a small glass bead that runs a groove under the till lip. Keene said she did not want the ribbon on the fifth beat. The bead had already dropped. The till sent fourteen bits for the spool and the three-bit rise on the oats to the strongbox, and it printed the word confirmed beside a line the council's sheet calls gaze.
The ribbon stayed on the peg. Amaranth tried to put the charge back by the ordinary void, the one that works on a mis-weighed sack. The lattice answered that a confirmed gaze cannot be unwound by a weight void. She wrote the refusal in the night book at 8:40, with the bead still sitting in the lower cup.
Dusk Stripe, shop-charm grant at the Equestrian Trade Council, called the ribbon a courtesy. "We are not putting words in a mouth," Stripe said. "The ear started a sentence. The lattice finished it before the pony had to go looking."
He said the courtesy curve had been shown to merchants in a closed debut at the Canterlot Institute in October, and that four shops had taken the lattice. Copper Measure is the only one that has sent a night book. The other three, he said, are "in a quiet season."
The method sheet that left the debut is six pages. It lists dwell, ear angle, and the courtesy steps. It does not list the four-count, the bead, or the rule that a gaze line survives an ordinary void. Amaranth's copy, pinned under the till, has the four-count written in her own pencil on the back of page two. She said a fitter from the grant had told her the count during installation and had not stayed for the first evening.
Celestia University's small-goods bench received the six pages on Thursday and ran them Friday morning with a sack, a peg, a bell, and a clerk instructed to turn one ear and then refuse. The bench price stayed at eight. The slip carried one line. No bead was in the apparatus they were sent. The anticipated line never opened, so the void was not tested.
Ivo Bramble, bench technician on that shift, read the result back against Amaranth's night book and stopped. "We repeated the sheet," Bramble said. "We did not repeat the till. Their sheet ends before the part that takes the bits."
The university returned the packet unsigned. A note on the cover, in Bramble's hand, circles a blank where the four-count would sit and records the Friday slip as one line at eight bits. The Canterlot Institute has not issued a correction to the October showing. Stripe said a revised sheet would follow "after the shops have lived with it."
By Wednesday close the lattice had added 186 bits across eleven gaze lines, ninety-eight of them on seven ribbon spools. Six of those spools were still on the peg. Amaranth counted the peg twice.
Keene's fourteen bits were still in the strongbox when Amaranth checked it Thursday noon. On Friday the unsigned packet joined the bead in the back drawer. No second workshop has posted her price.
