Steinvald

Steinvald has pleaded the gate-count doctrine on Thurmgrim's behalf at the Forge since 811 AF and has charged nothing for it. Steinvald wants the Accords left where they are, and a cold hold's gates reopened for measurement would be the first count in eight hundred years to go against the wording.

Steinvald and the Natron Shelves have argued Clause II land against each other three times, most recently over whether Emberkeel is one holding or fourteen underground passages: Steinvald pleads the gate count as it reads from the air, Ravenscarp pleads surveyed acre. Both cite the ruling of 118 AF, drafted to settle the point, and it has been read four ways since.

Steinvald has moved twice at the Forge to have the elven concurrence struck as an interested filing, on the ground that a house of two living names cannot bind a reach. Isperil lodges it again each time, and Steinvald's practice loses a little standing whenever the Forge declines to rule.

Falkbeard's lease runs a hundred and twenty years, falls due in eleven, and the half-plate matching Steinvald's was last produced by a Falkbeard factor in 801 AF. Steinvald has lodged a note of that at the Forge and taken no other step, which is what a house entered as Holds does with a question it does not want opened.

The Sturmhalt Water head lies inside Falkbeard's leased gate, and Steinvald draws its whole winter supply through it at a rate cut in lead in 604 AF. Steinvald is the lessor of that gate and has not decided whether to enforce a rent against a house with nobody left to owe it.

Men sent to the Cinders on twelve-year terms who die there are walled into the rock behind Steinvald's working face at four marks a course, under a licence Steinvald grants the Watch by the year. Sturmhalt's chapel then calls the names at three assemblies, and neither house will concede which rite fulfilled the obligation.

At every Hrimgard assembly the Watch's speaker moves that the plates be read aloud once a year at the Forge, and Steinvald's ironletters answer the motion in writing without having been asked. Sturmhalt's stake stands in the register as Breaks and Steinvald's as Holds, and both sides now quote the entry at each other rather than the argument.

The two houses read plate law for half the March between them and will not seal the same instrument, since a Kazdrunn contract is cut in metal and matched while an Amasekan one is void if the seals go on out of seating order. A client wanting both opinions pays for two documents, a translator, and a third house to hold them together.

Ancarien drafted the Drusenmark villages' complaint that a underground passage driven beneath a spring takes the spring, then sold Steinvald the reply that a gate below is not a holding above. Steinvald pays for the second opinion and files it, and has not yet asked who paid for the first.

Two hundred quarters of barley and forty hundredweight of dried mushroom come over the southern pass to Steinvald each summer, priced against the pass standing open eighty days. Brakkenstone takes half the payment in treaty opinions, which it uses in its own gate-count disputes and considers the better half of the bargain.