The potter wanted his table back.
Lyra looked at the witness statements spread across it, then at the boards of stock waiting beside the wall.
“Ten more minutes?”
“Ten minutes, or noble ten minutes?”
She checked the yard clock.
“Actual ones.”
He nodded and started moving his stock into the shade. The lesson’s observers were leaving for work. A few sponsors remained to clarify what Lyra intended to file beneath their names.
One wanted the shared workshop to guarantee cheap training. Another thought a material contribution bought priority whenever he needed a repair.
Tamsin opened the commitments they’d signed at Hana’s meeting.
“A fixed block. Not every opening.”
Lyra began summarizing the disagreement as agreed priority arrangements.
The contributor stopped her.
“That isn’t what I’m asking.”
She looked at the words she’d chosen. They made the sheet neater by moving the quarrel into a future somebody else would have to live through.
She crossed them out.
“Then we record the limit you actually signed, and your request separately.”
He wasn’t delighted, but he could recognize his own request on the page.
A gust reached under the table and lifted the top statement. The contributor caught it against his sleeve, smearing the edge of his own name before it had dried.
Lyra offered him another sheet.
“Does that mean starting again?”
“Only the signature. The terms stay the same.”
He reread them while she weighted the corners. Tamsin continued packing the practice boards rather than stand beside him until he felt hurried enough to agree.
The lamp keeper asked where her service statement belonged. It described heat at an unlit fitting and the temporary light arrangement. She hadn’t attended the whole lesson and didn’t want her name beneath an account of it.
Lyra moved the sheet into the safety bundle.
The neat single pile became three. She could imagine the registrar disliking it. The alternative was letting a woman certify a lesson she’d arrived too late to see.
The potter cleared his throat. Two minutes remained.
Lyra stopped trying to rearrange the piles into one. She tied each separately, wrote its purpose on the cover and asked Barnaby to check that no statement had wandered beneath the wrong label.
He did. The lamp keeper relaxed when she saw her own account where it belonged.
Dorr gave his specific statement about the market pump’s operation, the manual cutoff and Tamsin’s completed inspection of his stall. He did not claim the installation had already happened. His money still reserved that future job.
Lyra gathered the signed sheets before her ten minutes ended. The potter slid a board of stock into the cleared space as soon as the last paper lifted.
She would have liked to consider that rude. It was his table.
At the charter registry, the registrar accepted the public lesson record and read the proposed household category.
“Who answers for a debt if two members leave?”
Lyra indicated the defined accounts.
“For their accepted contributions, the named signers. Shared instruction and repair obligations have—”
“Do they reside together?”
“Some temporarily. Others have businesses in the district.”
“Does all teaching income belong to Felix Vance?”
“No.”
“The craftswoman’s tools?”
“Hers.”
The registrar set his pen down.
“Then calling them one household hasn’t established what authority receives the charter.”
She looked at the teaching statements beneath his hand. Nobody disputed that people had learned something. The problem had moved to the person, or thing, that could promise tomorrow’s lesson and answer for its failure.
“An established patron household would be simpler,” he said. “Recognized standing behind the charter. Dependents and retainers listed under it.”
Lyra knew the route. She had grown up inside it.
He brought out the relevant form, and the Ashford name looked extraordinarily efficient in its proper space.
Her agency remained protected while the family dispute proceeded. Her authority to pledge estate funds was another issue, but a personal patron arrangement might still supply the legal hierarchy this office understood.
“Pending capacity evidence would remain relevant,” the registrar said. “But this category has precedents.”
She imagined carrying a clean answer back to Felix.
Then she imagined explaining to Tamsin that the tools remained hers but their owner had become a retainer beneath an Ashford.
“What other precedents?” Lyra asked.
“For a household?”
“For several independent craftspeople teaching from shared premises.”
He considered the question, then pointed toward the public index.
“Instructional properties. You’ll need a recognized category and its obligations, not a title you prefer.”
She thanked him and took the patron form with her. She wasn’t going to pretend it hadn’t tempted her simply because she looked for another route.
In the public index room, the first cross-reference led to a shelf whose label had been replaced without changing the copied entry. The lower bundles were tied so tightly that Lyra couldn’t ease the relevant one free without shifting two others.
An assistant came over before she tried pulling harder.
“Which property?”
She gave the reference.
“That title changed when the yards merged. You’re in the old grants.”
“Noble households?”
“Trade instruction. This side.”
Lyra followed him to a plainer shelf. It had fewer handsome seals and a great deal of writing about drains, broken equipment and who owed whom the use of a bench.
The older cooperative charter belonged to several craft masters who had taught apprentices from one yard. No member owned the others. Their use of the property depended on named maintenance and access duties. Instruction had schedules, receipts and people responsible for providing it.
Lyra read beyond the useful title.
Hours had to be committed. Shared income required its own account. Disputes went through a stated process. A member could leave, with obligations defined rather than silently abandoned.
The assistant brought the merged yard’s later entry as well as the older charter. Lyra had found a promising beginning. She needed to know whether the arrangement had survived contact with the rest of its life.
One member had left. The replacement process was recorded. A repair dispute had delayed access to one bench without dissolving the whole cooperative. The later entry kept the property conditions rather than quietly erasing them once the founders were comfortable.
Lyra traced the note about departure with the blunt end of her pencil.
“This doesn’t require everyone to remain forever.”
“No,” the assistant said. “It requires them to say what happens when they don’t.”
He showed her the copy fee and the certification point. She paid for the relevant reference, not a whole bound history she could not carry comfortably and didn’t need to claim she’d read.
A man at the neighboring shelf asked which noble grant she’d found.
“Trade instruction,” she answered.
He looked disappointed and turned back to his own index.
She kept writing. The less impressive shelf was giving her more useful words.
It was less comfortable than putting one powerful name above everybody else.
She copied the relevant clauses while the assistant checked the reference against the changed title. One line in her first copy omitted the maintenance condition. He pointed it out before certifying anything.
She added it, then read the whole passage again.
The successful part of the lesson could support this route. It could not substitute for the duties the old charter required.
Back in the yard, Felix was resting in the shade while Tamsin finished packing the boards. Barnaby had kept the witness copies level beneath a clean cover.
Lyra put both routes on a smaller work surface the potter allowed them to use briefly.
The patron form drew immediate attention from one impatient contributor.
“Why not sign that? You’re an Ashford.”
“It places the others under my household authority.”
“If it gets through the auction—”
Felix opened one eye.
“I’d prefer not to announce myself as her junior household ornament.”
“You’d be a poor ornament,” Lyra said.
“Demanding maintenance. Little shine.”
The contributor laughed, then pointed back to the financial question.
Lyra didn’t let the joke answer it.
“The cooperative route requires more commitments. It can still fail. We need named instruction, shared accounts and a dispute process the members actually accept.”
Tamsin read the copied precedent.
“My outside customers remain outside. My tools too.”
“Yes. Shared premises and the stated work. Not every private job.”
The hauler wanted the accident liability stated rather than left somewhere beneath the word responsible. Hana wanted to know who could book meetings during trade. Dorr checked that his installation payment had not become a contribution to someone else’s teaching board.
Lyra answered each from the defined arrangement or left the point for agreement when the existing paper didn’t answer.
One contributor wanted unrestricted workshop access after all. When that wasn’t offered, he withdrew his name.
She let him leave.
It hurt the neatness of the list and spared them an invented agreement. She was beginning to recognize how often the first could disguise the absence of the second.
The debate over liability took longer than the title. One sponsor wanted a signature to mean support and nothing that could cost him later. Another thought the shared account should absorb every accident at any member’s private shop.
Tamsin placed her separate business receipt beside the draft.
“If this job isn’t in the common schedule, why would your subscription pay for its mistakes?”
The second man considered the question, then withdrew the demand. The first agreed to the limited contribution only after Lyra showed exactly where his obligation ended.
Felix asked whether he could be required to teach a subject the petition’s supporters thought useful but he didn’t know.
“Not under a line that names your actual instruction,” Lyra said.
He read that line again and crossed out a broad phrase he’d offered too casually at the meeting. Basic circuit safety was something he could demonstrate. General cultivation mastery was somebody else’s advertisement.
The draft grew more specific and less magnificent. Lyra found she could answer questions about it without borrowing authority from a name at the top.
They narrowed the common structure to instruction, shared premises and specified public repair duties. Private lives remained outside it. Named members would govern the stated work under the review process they copied from the older precedent, adapted only where their actual commitments differed.
Felix read the proposed instructor line twice.
“These hours are mine?”
“The ones you offered.”
“Keep the gaps.”
She kept them.
Barnaby checked her copied wording against the certified reference. He found an uncertain letter, asked which word it was and corrected the copy without claiming he’d remembered the whole precedent years ago.
Before the registry closed, Lyra carried the revised classification back with the stated commitments and teaching evidence.
The registrar read it, turned to the reference certification and checked the shared duties.
“This may be admitted for the panel’s consideration.”
She waited. She had learned to hear the rest of that sentence.
Final teaching responsibility. Safe transition from temporary repair. Attestation concerning the old charter holder. The questions remained.
He gave the public lesson evidence a receipt and entered the cooperative precedent in the file. He did not give her a deed, a charter or a promise that the auction would be postponed.
Lyra took the receipt anyway.
Outside, she folded the rejected patronage draft behind the reference copy. Both had been possible. Only one described what she’d actually asked the others to accept.
In the yard, the potter was already using his returned table. She checked the clock, then gave him the finished copy of his statement from the separate board.
“Preferred the version with fewer signatures,” he said.
“So did I. Then I noticed how many people it would make me responsible for owning.”
He glanced at the page, grunted and set it somewhere dry.
Lyra sat on the empty stool for a moment. The simpler form remained in her folder, still simple, still waiting for someone who needed relief badly enough to sign it.
She put the receipt inside her folder before standing, then carried every separate bundle to the landing.