“Silence in the courtyard!” Senior Elder Tor Ves’s voice boomed across the flat stone slabs. He stepped up to the dark wood scale table and swept the forty copper cash into the sect’s brass toll box with a single motion of his sleeve.
Rather than rage at Bel Sar or contest the tax clerk’s signed name, the veteran sect administrator pulled back instantly behind the strict, unbending letter of the founding charter.
“The challenger has completed thirty breaths under Article Four, and Ash Reed Sect honors its founder’s word without complaint,” Tor Ves announced to the fifty watching buyers. He lifted the shallow reed bowl and pouring its two pounds of dove-grey third-terrace ash through a brass funnel into the clean heavy clay jar Mina held open.
Then Tor Ves set the empty reed bowl upside down on the table and tapped the carved charter slip beside the scale.
“And as the country clerks will confirm from the fourth paragraph of that same Article, a victorious guest challenger is entitled to purchase one two-pound bowl at the forty-copper rate—and no second challenge may be entered by the same household or clinic during a single winter market!”
The murmurs of the watching herbalists died away as the senior tax clerk checked his leather book and gave a reluctant nod. The clause was there in black and white.
