Prospern

Prospern sells Erevanth the arrears lists of the Sturmhalt convict-store contracts, which is how an elven creditor four cells south learns that a northern debtor has stopped paying before the assembly does. Prospern has two names in it and prices the service accordingly.

Four of the Wolds' watch-road clerks and both its tally-men were taught at Prospern, at eleven marks a head a year set against the barley account. Prospern also drafts Belcarrow's returns for the assembly, which is why the Wolds figures are the only ones the assembly does not argue about.

Prospern stands on a gravel bar and grows nothing, so its bread comes down the tundra track from the Wolds, ninety quarters of barley and a wagon of mutton every quarter-year. Belcarrow takes half the price in schooling and half in coin, and reviews the rate whenever the weirs have had a good run.

Nuirendil sends its toll clerks north to Prospern for a winter each, because a Falkvald wharf schedule is read aloud and an elven records office cannot plead ignorance of what was said in a room it kept a man in. Nuirendil pays forty marks a head, on time every winter.

Both houses have lodged competing claims at the Forge to Falkbeard's informant ledgers, each arguing that a Cipherhouse book with no living name behind it falls to whoever holds the room it sits in. Prospern carries two names and cannot put any distance between the house and the act; Kaldwyn's pleadings are filed through an agency and name nobody at all.

Prospern's weirs sit across both channels at the head of the inlet, and the sulphur barges coming down the Sturmhalt Water are poled through a gap the weir-keepers open at their own hour. Tessarel has brought the matter to the assembly four times, and each hearing has ended in a ruling read aloud that the two houses record differently.

Weir stakes, hurdles and the platform decking at Prospern are cut and driven by Duskenmoor's yard, two hundred stakes a year on a standing order. Duskenmoor knows the same weirs are what Tessarel is suing about and has raised its price for the difficulty rather than pick a side.

An advance of two hundred and twenty marks made to Prospern in 779 AF has gone three assemblies without being formally read, which every bench on the March treats as abandonment. Faenlorn's committee treats it as outstanding and has begun entering the interest at the Forge instead, where nothing has to be said aloud.