Rule 5203 - Arrive Before The Ink Dries - Part 2 of 3

The Larkspur delegation arrived four hours later, better rested and noticeably more offended than their heir-apparent had been, and set about establishing, with a thoroughness Bjorn found almost admirable, exactly how much offence a customs hall could physically hold.

Lord Steward Aldric Penshaw was not, Bjorn decided within five minutes of meeting him, a villain in any sense the job had yet taught him to recognise. He was courteous to the point of exhaustion, visibly fond of Ide in the worried way of a man who believed with his whole chest that he was protecting her from a decision she’d regret — and entirely unable to hear, across six separate attempts, that she did not want protecting from this particular one.

“She is young,” Penshaw said to Rolf, in the tone of a man explaining something obvious to someone he assumed hadn’t grasped it. “And marriage, at her age, always looks like a wall before it turns out to be a door. I’ve seen it a dozen times at court. She’ll thank me in a decade.”

“She’s telling you, now, in this room, that she won’t,” Rolf said. “I’d suggest treating that as data rather than symptom.”

Penshaw looked genuinely wounded by this, in a way that made Bjorn like him rather more than he’d expected to, and more than he suspected was going to be convenient for anyone.

He had arrived with a retinue disproportionate to the crisis: two secretaries, a notary, a physician “in case the shock of the journey has told on her,” and six ceremonial guard whom Bjorn would shortly come to know better than he wanted to. He spent his first quarter-hour attempting, with visible sincerity, to have the entire proceeding relocated to a more appropriately dignified room, on the grounds that a Larkspur succession matter deserved better than a public customs counter.

Rolf declined, gently and without room for negotiation. The counter was precisely where Rule 5,203 lived, he said, and moving the conversation elsewhere would not move the Rule with it.

“You understand,” Penshaw said, lowering his voice as though the volume itself were a courtesy, “that this isn’t merely a wedding. It’s eleven years of careful work between two courts. A girl’s temporary distress, however sincerely felt, oughtn’t to be allowed to undo eleven years in an afternoon.”

“It isn’t the afternoon undoing it. It’s a Rule, applied to a fact. The fact is either true or it isn’t.”

“And if I instruct my notary to seal the contract aboard the courier ship itself, under Larkspur’s own maritime authority, before it ever reaches your counter?”

“Then you’d be sealing a contract that requires Harbour registration, without the Harbour’s registration.” Rolf did not raise his voice; he rarely needed to. “Which would leave you with a document Esk has no obligation to honour, and Larkspur’s own courts a very interesting question to answer about why its Steward tried to route around the one authority both signatories actually need. I wouldn’t recommend it. Not because I’d stop you — I likely couldn’t, on the open water — but because it solves nothing and costs you more than you’d save.”

Penshaw did not attempt the manoeuvre. Watching his face over the silence that followed, Bjorn suspected some part of him had known the answer before he asked, and had asked anyway, in the particular hope every desperate person eventually reaches for: that someone else might tell him a shortcut existed where he already knew, in his own bones, that it didn’t.

Esk’s delegation arrived within the hour, in the person of Ambassador Wynn Halloway — a broad, cheerfully rumpled man who took one look at the tableau and said, to nobody in particular, “Ah. It’s going the way I told them it would go.”

“You’re not here to stop it?” Bjorn asked, before he could stop himself.

“I’m here because it’s my job to be here.” Halloway settled onto the waiting bench with the ease of a man who had made peace with several outcomes before arriving. “My own prince, between us, would be considerably relieved if this fell through. He’s fond of a girl in the Esk shipping office and has said so, to me, more than once, in language I’m not going to repeat in a customs hall. But it isn’t my match to unmake, any more than it’s yours, lad. So here I sit, representing my court’s interest in the treaty, and privately hoping the lady’s own arithmetic works out before anyone has to say any of this out loud where it’ll cost somebody their position.”

Bjorn wrote this down later, under a heading he didn’t share with anyone: sometimes nobody involved actually wants the thing everyone’s fighting over.

* * *

The running trouble, when it started, was not about the marriage at all, which Bjorn found almost restful by comparison.

It began with the two delegations’ honour guards — six Larkspur men in ceremonial blue, four Esk men in a plainer grey — arguing, with mounting formality, over whose banner should fly from the taller of the two flagpoles outside Berth Four.

“Precedence,” said Sergeant Rooke of Larkspur, “belongs to the party whose heir is physically present.”

“Precedence,” said Lieutenant Fenn of Esk, with the weary patience of a man who had had some version of this argument at every port his delegation had ever visited, “belongs to whichever flag arrived at the pole first. Which was ours, by a clear eleven minutes, which your own dockmaster logged.”

Neither man was wrong by the terms of his own court’s custom, and neither was willing to be the one who conceded first. By early afternoon the dispute had escalated through three distinct and increasingly baroque stages, which Bjorn catalogued from the registry window with the fascinated horror of a man watching a slow-motion collision.

The first stage was procedural: an exchange of increasingly specific citations, Rooke quoting a Larkspur convention on precedence-by-presence, Fenn countering with a maritime custom on precedence-by-arrival, each apparently satisfied that a sufficiently precise citation would end the matter.

The second stage was logistical: unable to out-cite each other, both men resorted to out-positioning each other’s banner by small, deniable increments — an inch gained here on the pretext of adjusting a snagged line, an inch reclaimed there on the pretext of checking the knot.

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The third, reached by mid-afternoon, was the standoff proper: both banners halfway up and halfway down the same pole at once, held by opposing hands, neither side willing to let go first for fear of what letting go would be taken to mean. A small and growing audience of off-duty dockhands watched with the frank enjoyment of people who had found, entirely by accident, the best free entertainment of the week.

“They’ve been at this for two hours,” Bell observed, arriving at the registry window with the day’s third pot of tea, “over a flagpole neither delegation actually needs, since there’s a second, identical pole not forty feet away that nobody’s thought to use, because nobody wants to be seen using the lesser one.”

“Have you told them that?”

“I have not.” Bell said it with the serene satisfaction of a man who had learned, over a long career, exactly which fires were worth putting out personally and which were better left to burn down to a manageable size on their own schedule. “Some arguments need to exhaust themselves before anyone involved is willing to hear a solution. I’ve found telling them early only teaches them to argue faster next time.”

“It’s a flagpole,” Bjorn said, arriving at Verger Roan’s side as she surveyed the scene with the flat exhaustion of a woman who had dealt with an unauthorised shrine in this same hall the week before and had rather hoped for a quieter one.

“It’s never a flagpole,” Roan said. “It’s always what the flagpole means to the person holding it. Same as last week’s candles.”

She said it without looking away from the standoff, which had, in the last minute, added a third element: Ide herself, arriving to see what the shouting was about, watching both honour guards defend her own wedding’s protocol with a great deal more passion than either had shown for the wedding itself.

“Take them both down,” Ide said, to general astonishment on both sides. “Fly neither. I am marrying — or not marrying — nobody’s flagpole.”

It was the single most Ide thing Bjorn had yet seen her do, and it worked, mostly because nobody on either side had a rehearsed response to a principal simply declining to be fought over.

It did not, however, work quickly. Rooke would not lower his banner until Fenn lowered his, and Fenn would not lower his while Rooke’s hands were still on the halyard, so both men remained at the foot of the pole, negotiating the mechanics of simultaneous surrender, for a further twenty minutes.

Which was where they both still were when the storm came in.

* * *

It arrived without much warning, the way Harbour storms sometimes did — a sudden greying of the light, a wind that changed its mind twice in ten minutes before committing to a direction, and then rain hard enough to send the dockhand audience scattering for cover, leaving both honour guards, still gripping their respective halyards, to discover that neither man’s pride extended quite as far as standing in an open squall over a piece of cloth.

It was into this that the courier ship came, well ahead of its scheduled window, its captain having pushed hard through worsening weather on Penshaw’s own private instruction to beat whatever margin the heir-apparent’s borrowed fishing sloop had bought her.

The ship came in fast, too fast for the crosswind it was fighting, and its forward mooring line — thrown early, in the general urgency, by a deckhand who would later admit he’d been told to hurry twice in the last hour by two different superiors — caught wrong around the bollard and snapped back across the dock with the flat, vicious crack of a whip.

It scattered the honour guards, the dock crew, and the last of the onlookers directly into the path of a swinging cargo boom that the ship’s own crew, fighting the wind, had no time left to control.

Rolf’s hand went, without visible haste, to an inside coat pocket too shallow to hold anything at all.

“Down,” he said, in the flat carrying voice that Bjorn had, on one previous afternoon, watched stop thirty people where they stood.

It did not work.

Perhaps four people heard him. The rest were already moving, in a howling crosswind, on wet stone, with a ship’s hull groaning against its fenders eight feet away — and Bjorn understood, in the half-second it took him to register it, that a voice which could hold a closed room could do very little against open water and weather.

The boom shrank. That much worked: the Vanish caught it mid-arc, in the instant after Rolf’s hand cleared his pocket, the whole spar dwindling from the length of a rowing boat to roughly that of a knitting needle, which the wind snatched and sent skittering harmlessly across the wet stone, as though the storm had been handed, for one held breath, a much smaller argument than the one it came with.

The people did not stop. They scattered, badly, in four directions.

“Cordon the bollard, clear to the sheds, move them by the shoulder — go!” Roan was already in among them, not shouting instructions so much as physically turning people by the arm and pointing them at a wall. Her people fanned out and did the same. It was unglamorous, close-quarters, entirely unmagical work, and it emptied the dangerous eight feet of dock in under thirty seconds, which was twenty-five seconds faster than anything else available that afternoon.

It was not, however, the only danger on the dock.

The snapped mooring line, still under tension from the ship’s own drift, had wrapped itself around Sergeant Rooke’s ankle in the initial chaos — Rooke having been, at the critical moment, exactly where he had spent the last two hours being, which was at the foot of a flagpole, refusing to let go of a halyard. It was dragging him, inch by inch, towards the edge of the berth as the ship continued to yaw.

Bjorn didn’t remember deciding to move.

He remembered his own hand — a real, fumbling, half-second-too-long search through his coat — before the Vanish was simply there, and the line, the whole dangerous taut length of it from bollard to ankle, was quite simply not. Not cut. Not slackened. Gone — not shrunk to a toy, this time, but banished, or rendered inert somewhere neither of them would ever be asked to specify.

Sergeant Rooke sat down hard on the wet stone, unhurt, staring at his own suddenly-free ankle with an expression Bjorn recognised, because he suspected his own face had worn it the first time he’d watched Rolf do something similar.

Roan had Rooke on his feet and checked for injury within a minute, his ceremonial blue soaked through and his dignity far more damaged than his ankle. She had the courier ship’s own crew organised into a proper mooring party within two, working the forward line by hand now that the bollard’s automatic catch had proven exactly as unreliable as the accident suggested.

“Report,” she said, to no one and everyone, already moving on to the next problem.

Bjorn’s own hands, he noticed only once the immediate danger had passed, would not quite stop shaking — a small private aftershock nobody else seemed to have time to remark on. Rolf, passing close on his way to check the boom’s crew for injury, laid a hand briefly on his shoulder. Not a word. Not a lesson. Just the plain fact of it, and gone again before Bjorn could decide whether to be embarrassed by needing it.

It was Bell who said the thing that mattered, twenty minutes later, standing in the doorway of the registry with rain still coming off his coat in a steady line onto the floor.

“The day-book,” he said.

Bjorn looked at him.

“The entry. It’s open on my desk, half-written, and it has been for two hours, because I have spent those two hours on a dock.” Bell’s voice had not changed at all, which was how Bjorn knew. “It needs finishing and it needs the Harbour Master’s counter-signature, and the Harbour Master has spent those same two hours where I have.”

Through the window behind him, the courier ship sat finally, safely moored, its captain white-faced on the gangway.

And coming down the gangway behind him, pressed against his chest with both arms, a Larkspur notary carried a sealed leather document case towards the customs hall.

Ide, arriving at Bjorn’s shoulder, watched it come.

“It’s here,” she said. “Whatever else just happened. It’s here, and I’m not on the record.”

Above the secondary counter, the registry clock showed a quarter of an hour to dusk.

End of Part 2