Chapter 67: Standing
Corvane read the seven characters twice, put the paper down, and said the worst sentence Mataon had heard since he arrived in this world.
"I’ve approved four hundred entries from that office."
The border-post smelled of wet wool and coal smoke. Outside, the snow had turned to the grey slush that comes three days after a fall, when winter stops being weather and becomes a condition.
Mataon had ridden two days to put that code in front of her.
"You know it, then."
"I know the code."
She turned the sheet toward the lamp, as though better light might make it into something else.
"I don’t know the office. I’ve never known the office. Thirty-one years and nobody has ever told me I was supposed to."
He waited. That was the whole of his method, most days.
Corvane got up and went to a shelf that held the things a border magistrate needs and nobody ever reads. She came back with a bound volume the size of a paving stone and set it down hard enough to make the lamp jump.
"Ashvale Marches. Foreign Instruments. Article Nine."
Her finger went down the page and stopped.
"Read it to me. Out loud. I want to hear how it sounds in a stranger’s mouth."
Mataon read it. His Gaiark was still slow, and legal Gaiark was worse, and he went back twice.
"It’s reciprocity," he said. Then, because he was not sure: "I think. The word in the third line—"
"Mutual acceptance."
"Then reciprocity. Say the rest of it back to me and tell me if I have it."
"You say it. That’s the point of the exercise."
"The Marches accepts a foreign registry’s entries as filed. Without verification. On condition that the foreign registry accepts ours the same way."
He put a finger on the clause.
"Neither side checks."
"No."
"Ever."
Corvane took the sheet back and squared it against the edge of the desk, which she did not need to do.
"You want me to tell you it’s more complicated than that. It isn’t."
He sat with it while the fire did its ordinary work.
He had come here expecting corruption, and corruption would have been easier. Corruption has a person in it, and a person can be audited.
This was two registries agreeing ninety years ago not to look at each other, and nobody since had been paid to wonder about it.
"Why would anyone sign that?"
"Because the alternative is verifying every entry from every registry on the continent, and no borough on this coast could pay for it."
Corvane sat back down. Her hands stayed flat on the book.
"Because it was written by people who assumed the other side was mostly honest. Because it works, nine times in ten, and the tenth time is somebody else’s problem."
"The tenth time is forty-four people in my valley."
"Yes."
She did not soften it. He was beginning to think she was incapable of it, and to like her more for it.
"Then I want to challenge the entries," Mataon said.
"On what standing?"
"They’re false. That’s the standing."
"That’s an argument. Anyone can make an argument....but not anyone can win one."
Corvane pulled a smaller book from under the first.
"Standing is who gets to make it in front of Deuna. And Deuna won’t hear a stranger. You’re a stranger. It hears three parties."
She counted them on the book’s edge, not on her fingers.
"The claimant, the man who says he owns him. The subject. Or somebody registered with Deuna as entitled to speak for the subject."
"Then register me as their representative."
"Deuna doesn’t register foreign representatives."
"Ever?"
"Not in ninety years."
Mataon looked at the small book for a while.
Souk would have found the crack faster. Edrin would have wanted the exact wording. He did neither. He turned the thing over the way he turned a rigged scale, looking for the place where the weight was carried.
Claimant. Subject. Representative.
Two of those doors were shut. The third was not a door.
"The subject," he said.
Corvane’s hands came off the book.
"No."
"You haven’t heard the question yet."
"I’ve heard it four times in thirty-one years, from four clever people, and I buried two of them."
Her voice did not rise. That was somehow worse.
"You’re about to ask me what it would take for a registry to enter you."
The fire popped. Neither of them looked at it.
"Yes," Mataon said. "That’s the question, or rather, the demand..."
"Do you know what an entry is?" Corvane asked.
"A line of text."
"That’s what you think because you’ve never been inside one."
She took the seven-character code back and folded it once, along a crease that was already there.
"An entry is not a description of a person. You worked that out yourself, or you wouldn’t have ridden here. It’s an instruction. And the instruction doesn’t stop being true because the person it describes disagrees with it."
"I understand the risk."
"You understand the sentence. That’s not the same thing."
She held the folded paper out to him and did not let go when he took it.
"If Deuna enters you, you get standing. That part’s true. You also become what the entry says you are, everywhere Deuna is honoured, which is most of the continent and all of the water. Every road with a toll on it. Every port with a clerk. And the men who work those posts are paid by the head, not by the argument."
"And the forty-four?"
"Would have somebody who can speak for them. Yes."
She let go of the paper.
"So it’s a good idea. I’ve told you what happened to the last two good ideas that sat in that chair."
He rode back the next morning with the code in his coat and the shape of the thing sitting behind his sternum where the gods usually did.
He did not tell Almina what he was turning over. He did not have to.
"You are quiet," she said, some hours out.
"I’m counting."
"You are counting a door you have already decided to walk through."
"I’m counting what it costs."
"Then count honestly."
A pause, and her voice did something he had not heard it do before, which was hesitate on his account rather than her own.
"You have no lineage entry. No origin. No prior record anywhere in this world. Do you know how rare that is? Do you understand that it is the only reason nothing has found you yet?"
Mataon watched the road come up out of the slush.
"I know."
"Then know the other half. A blank line is not protection. It is an empty seat. And the moment you sit down in a registry to argue, you tell every office on this continent exactly where the seat is."
Barni was waiting at the valley neck, as though he had known which hour.
He fell in at the horse’s shoulder and said nothing for a quarter of a mile, which from him was a speech.
"You found the door," the old hybrid said at last.
"I found what it costs."
"Same thing. You’ll want a week to enjoy the first part before you’ll admit that, and I’ll allow it, because I’m generous and a fucking great man."
"...You are a cat-dog thing, or dog-cat one...for now, you are anything but a human being.
"That was mean... I do have a heart, after all..."
Snow came off a branch somewhere behind them.
"Barni."
Mataon kept his eyes on the road.
"If a registry writes you down, and the registry is wrong, does the world care that it’s wrong?"
The old hybrid walked four more steps before answering.
"No."
"You sound very certain."
"I am the most certain thing in this valley about that particular question."
Mataon reined in.
The old hybrid stopped too, and the two of them stood in the grey slush with the lit windows of Hearthroot a half mile below, and neither of them said the obvious thing, because the obvious thing had been sitting between them since a night on a cold wall six weeks ago.
[Registry challenge — standing analysis]
[Recognised parties: claimant · subject · registered representative]
[Foreign representative registration: unavailable — Deuna, ninety years, no precedent]
[Only viable standing: subject]
[Note: subject status confers the right to be heard, and the classification it is heard under]
Mataon folded the assessment away without reading it twice.
He had read enough of it the first time.
"Two hundred and thirty-one," he said.
"One hundred and eighty-seven of them count."
"And you are the one hundred and eighty-eighth thing on that list that does not," Barni said. "Which is a joke, Matski, and I would like you to notice that I am not laughing at it."