Chapter 72: Line Forty-Five
Corvane rode into Hearthroot on the fifteenth of Sylphenia, and she did not get off the horse.
She had never come before. Two days from the border-post in the thaw, on roads that were half water, and she sat in the lane outside the sick-house with the reins loose in one hand and waited for somebody to fetch him.
Kess fetched him. She had been the first to notice, because she noticed everything, and she came at a dead run and then did not say anything at all when she arrived. That frightened him more than shouting would have.
"Magistrate."
"I’ve a paper for you," Corvane said. "I’m going to hand it down and then I’m going to get off this horse, and I want it in that order, because once I’m standing in your town I’m a guest and this stops being official."
She handed it down.
It was one sheet, and the Deunan hand was very small and very even, and he had to turn it into the light.
Notice of pending classification. Subject: Mataon Gaael. Jurisdiction of residence: Hearthroot, Ashvale Marches. Originating office: seven characters he had been staring at since Frostmere.
Status: pending. Determination to follow.
He read it twice, and the second time he was reading a different document, because on the second reading he understood which drawer it had come out of.
"That’s the same form," he said.
"It’s the same form."
"This is what the forty-four have."
"It’s what the forty-four have," Corvane said, and got down off the horse. "You’re line forty-five."
They gave her the back room of the sick-house because it was the only room in the valley with a table long enough, and because by now the whole town knew where hard conversations happened and had begun routing itself around them without being asked.
Souk came. Edrin came. Barni came and lay under the table, and Corvane looked at him for a long moment and did not ask.
"Say the part I already know," Mataon said. "Get it out of the way."
"Article Nine." Corvane put both hands flat. "The Marches accepts a foreign registry’s instruments as filed. Without verification. I don’t get to decide whether it’s true. I get to decide where to put it."
"So you have to honour it."
"I have to honour it."
"And if you don’t?"
"Then Article Nine is broken by the Marches, in writing, on the record."
Souk got there before Mataon did, and Mataon watched her get there, and watched her face do the thing it did when the arithmetic came out badly.
"Every entry she’s ever accepted goes with it," Souk said.
"Yes."
"The buyer-book. The warrants. The two dukes and the temple treasurer."
"All of it." Corvane’s voice stayed exactly level. "Every instrument my office has taken in thirty-one years rests on that clause. Break it to save one man and I unmake the resettlement of two hundred and eleven people on the same afternoon, and the dukes walk, and the coast reopens by summer."
Nobody said anything for a while. Under the table, Barni had gone very still.
"Then honour it," Mataon said.
"I wanted you to say it," Corvane said. "Not because I needed permission. Because I’ve buried two and I’ve stopped being willing to do this to people quietly."
Edrin had his hands laced and his thumbs against his mouth, which was the posture he took when he was looking for a door in a wall.
"How long does a pending status run?"
"In theory, until determination. In practice, until somebody in Deuna has a reason to finish it." Corvane turned the sheet around with one finger. "The forty-four in your book have been pending for between nine months and six years. That is not mercy. It’s a queue."
"So he has time."
"He has time. He does not have safety. Pending is not nothing. Pending is what a port clerk reads when he’s deciding whether to look at your face."
She let that sit, and then she said the rest of it, because she had ridden two days and this was clearly the part she had come for.
"There is one thing I can do and I want to be honest about how small it is. I’m required to accept the instrument. I’m not required to be quick about where it’s filed. Foreign notices go to the Marches central roll on a quarterly return. The next return goes out on the first of Ravenmark."
Souk did the count out loud.
"Forty-seven days."
"Forty-seven days in which the only copy of this is in my office and in your hand. After that it’s in the central roll and every borough on the coast can read it."
"And after that?"
"After that they’ll send an assessor. That’s the next instrument, and it’s the one that has a man attached to it. He won’t be a soldier and he won’t be cruel. He’ll have a satchel and a warrant and he’ll be extremely polite, and that is worse, because you can’t fight polite."
Mataon sat with the paper in his hands and made himself feel the whole shape of it before he said anything, because the alternative was to start solving it, and he had learned in the autumn that solving a thing before you have felt it produces very clean answers to slightly wrong questions.
Then he put it face-down on the table.
"Fifty-one days," he said. "Thank you. That’s not small."
"It’s forty-seven days," Corvane said. "It’s the size it is."
***
She stayed the night, because the roads were water and because Vezra would not hear otherwise, and in the morning she stood at the gate looking at the second book on the new bench with an expression Mataon could not read at all.
"Founder: none of record," she said.
"That’s right."
"Did that work?"
"We’ll know when we file again."
"Mm." She got up on the horse. "For what it’s worth, I’ve read four charters in my life that tried to do what yours does. Three of them named a founder in the first line. All three of those are gone."
He was still working out whether that was encouragement when she was already forty paces down the lane.
He waited until the lane was empty before he said anything.
"Almina."
"Yes."
"You said ninety days."
"I did."
"It was fourteen."
There was a pause, and it was not the ordinary pause.
"Then I was wrong," she said. "I estimated from how that office moved ninety years ago. It does not move the way it used to. I do not know what changed, and I am telling you that I do not know, because you will make worse decisions if you believe I always do."
He stood in the lane with the notice in his coat pocket and thought about a ghost office that had been active for nineteen years and had recently learned to hurry.
[Notice of pending classification — accepted under Article Nine]
[Subject: Mataon Gaael · Status: pending · Determination to follow]
[Marches central roll: quarterly return, 1 Ravenmark — 47 days]
[Level 29 → Level 30]
[Stat points available: +3]
[Basis: the instrument was read correctly and its cost to a third party was accepted before it was contested]
[INT +1 · PER +1 · WIL +1]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 28 · INT 35 · PER 34 · WIL 39]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 104]
He went and found Anser, and had him copy the notice twice, and put one copy in the second book under the pending column, where it belonged.
Kess watched him do it and did not stop him.
"You’re line forty-five," she said.
"I am."
"That’s stupid."
"It’s completely stupid."
"No, I mean —" She frowned, working it. "You’re line forty-five in our book. Not in theirs. In our book there’s no pending column that means anything, because the charter says nobody here is property, so all it says is that somebody far away wrote something down about you."
Mataon looked at the page for a moment.
Then he crossed the column heading out, and wrote a new one above it in his own bad handwriting.
Claims made against citizens of this valley by authorities that do not recognise it.
"Longer," Kess said.
"It’s more accurate."
"Anser’s going to hate you."
"Anser is going to hate me a great deal," Mataon agreed, "and he’s going to write it out forty-five times anyway, because that’s the job."