Chapter 68: Reason Binds
Mataon laid the standing analysis on the bench where the roll was kept, and then sat down and shut up. That was the hard part.
They used the back room of the sick-house because it had the long table and a stove that drew. Eleven people in a space built for four. Winter light through the one window, the colour of dishwater.
Anser and Hanne had been drawn for the month. Anser was a copyist with ruined hands and better handwriting than anyone in the valley. Hanne had spent nine days in the quarantine shed and come out of it with opinions.
Edrin sat at the end with the charter open in front of him. He did not need it open.
"Read it," Anser said.
So Mataon read it out. Article Nine, and reciprocity, and ninety years of two registries agreeing not to check each other’s work. Then the three parties who may challenge an entry. Then the ninety years in which Deuna had registered no representative from anywhere else.
Then the part he had ridden two days to be able to say.
"The only door left is me. To speak for the forty-four, I have to be entered into Deuna myself."
The stove ticked. Nobody helped him.
"Entered as what," Hanne said.
It was not a question.
"As whatever they file."
Tovan got there first, the way he always did, by counting.
"Forty-four people. One of you. I can do that arithmetic in my head and so can everyone in this room."
"Then say the rest of it," Maelor said.
Tovan looked at him.
"You’ve done the arithmetic," Maelor said. "You haven’t done the reason. Reason’s the part that’s still standing here next winter."
Edrin turned the charter around without lifting it off the table, so the second line faced the room. He had proposed that line himself, in the autumn, when the town was twenty-two houses and a well.
Every decision is written with its reason, and the reason binds the next decision, including the founder’s.
"So write the reason," he said. "Out loud. I want to hear it before it goes in the book."
Mataon opened his mouth and found the reason was not the one he had rehearsed on the road.
"Because I’m the only one who can be spent," he said.
"That’s not a reason," Edrin said. "That’s a valuation. Try again."
Souk had not spoken since they sat down. She sat the way she always sat in other people’s meetings, straight-backed and half turned away, an inspector waiting for the room to finish talking so the facts could have a turn.
"Ask him what he’s holding," she said.
Edrin looked at her, then at Mataon.
"What are you holding?"
It had come from the wrong direction, and from a woman who had known him eleven weeks.
"You’d have to be specific," Mataon said.
"I’ll be specific." Souk put two fingers on the standing analysis. "A registry subject can be moved, taxed, and left to somebody’s nephew. What it can’t do is be a party to anything. So before you make yourself one, I want to know what you’re a party to now."
The room went quiet in a different way. Kess, who had been sitting on the wood-box because there was no chair left, stopped swinging her feet.
Mataon had two choices and only one of them was honest.
"Eighty-eight days ago I filed an exception," he said. "It’s still open. It cost eighteen mana to file and seven to hold. It’s been holding ever since."
"Holding what?" Hanne said.
"A man’s classification. There’s a High Goblin at a refuge under the ferns, four days southeast. His name is Orvek. Deuna has him written down as property and I made the Seven-Cut Covenant refuse to honour it."
He heard his own voice go flat and let it.
"Not everywhere. Inside the covenant. It’s a narrow door. It’s the only one there was."
Anser had already begun writing. He wrote everything; it was why he had been drawn.
"Seven mana," Tovan said slowly. "Since Sylphenia."
"Yes."
"You’ve been fighting Lidards on twenty-eight."
"I’ve been fighting Lidards on twenty-eight," Mataon agreed.
Barni, from the floor by the stove, said, "He has also been extremely irritating about it, in that he never once mentioned it, which I want the record to show I noticed."
"Noted," Anser said, and wrote that too.
Edrin had gone very still, and Mataon knew that stillness. It was the look of a man who had found the load-bearing wall and did not like where it was.
"Read me the wording," Edrin said. "The exception. Exactly."
Mataon closed his eyes and pulled it up. He had read it perhaps a thousand times.
"Petitioner: Mataon Gaael. Duration: until the subject receives independent recognition from an authority he accepts, or the exception is withdrawn with his consent. Claimant registry granted right to contest."
"Say the first word again."
"Petitioner."
"And what did Souk just tell you a subject can’t be?"
"A party to anything."
Hanne swore, once, quietly, and apologised to Kess, who waved it off with the weariness of a nine-year-old who has heard worse from adults all winter.
Edrin put both hands flat on the charter.
"Then the plan eats itself. The day Deuna writes you down, you stop being able to hold the thing that keeps Orvek out of a chain. You’d buy standing for forty-four people with the standing you already spent on one."
"Yes," Mataon said. "I know."
"You knew before you came in here."
"I worked it out on the road."
"And you came in here anyway and let us find it."
"I came in here because I’m not allowed to decide it," Mataon said. "That’s the whole point of the book."
Nobody said anything for a moment, and the moment went on slightly too long, and Mataon understood that he had just been paid a compliment nobody in the room intended to make out loud.
Kess got down off the wood-box.
She had the roll under her arm, because she always had the roll under her arm, and she put it on the table next to the standing analysis and opened it to the page where the names were.
"Is he in here?"
"No," Mataon said.
"Then you can’t."
Anser stopped writing.
"Kess," Hanne said, not unkindly, "that’s not how the—"
"It is how it works." Kess did not raise her voice. She had learned that from someone in this room and Mataon was not proud of knowing which one. "The town decides for the town, and he’s not the town, and he’s not in the book, so we don’t get to spend his thing."
Souk made a small sound that might have been approval.
"She’s right," she said. "She also got there the right way. Most grown people don’t."
Edrin looked at Anser. Anser looked at Hanne. Hanne, who was the other half of the drawn pair and who had spent nine days in a shed while a town decided things about her without asking, took rather a long time to answer.
"Write it," she said at last.
Anser wrote it, and then read it back, because that was the rule.
"The roll declines to decide. Reason: the founder’s plan would end a protection held over a person who is not a citizen, is not present, and has not been asked. No protection is spent without the person it protects. This binds the founder, this binds the next pair, and this binds the roll."
"Sign it," Hanne said.
They signed it. Anser’s hand shook and the signature came out badly and nobody suggested he do it again.
[Precedent recorded — Hearthroot Decision Roll]
[No protection is spent without the person it protects]
[Founder’s proposal: declined without prejudice]
[Reserved Mana: 7 — First Exception, open, day 88]
[Feat achieved: the founder brought his own disqualification to the bench]
[WIL +1]
[STR 20 · AGI 19 · END 28 · INT 33 · PER 32 · WIL 36]
Mataon read it, and felt the small cold thing he had been carrying since the border-post shift very slightly, from dread into work.
They filed out into the snow to do the ordinary jobs. Orlo needed the room back. Tovan had a roof crew waiting and had already been waiting too long.
Edrin stayed.
"You want to say something," Mataon said.
"I want to say I’d have voted the other way," Edrin said. "Forty-four against one. I’d have spent you. I’ve been sitting there for an hour deciding whether that makes me a good man or a useful one."
"Neither. It makes you a man who can count."
"That’s what worries me."
Barni was waiting at the door with snow already on his back. He had gone outside and come in again to arrange that.
"Four days southeast," he said.
"Four days southeast."
"You’ll want me."
"I’ll want you."
"Good, because you were going to get me." Barni went down the step ahead of him and stopped at the bottom, and did not turn around. "Matski. He hasn’t come here. In seventy days of you building a town whose first line is that nobody is property, the first person you ever unmade a chain for has not walked in the gate once."
Mataon stood on the step and let the cold get into his coat.
"I know."
"Do you know why?"
"No."
"Good," Barni said. "It would be worse if you’d guessed and been comfortable with it."