Ravenscarp

The records office stair charges Marrowe's carts a surcharge on every load that has passed within sight of Marrowe's burning ground. Six Ironletter opinions have been written on whether the surcharge is a rate or a penalty, and each was paid for by the house that wanted its answer.

Marrowe drafts the Reach pleadings on the water-share security question at eight crowns the page, and is the only Amasekan practice inside the Reach the records office will take a filing from. Ravenscarp retains it because a Marrowe opinion cannot be dismissed at the Forge as Sekhemri special pleading.

Ravenscarp has drafted the Reach's annual reply to the underground passage boundary' boundary claim since 803, sealed by the water records office and paid for out of tomb rents. Drennhold files its own answer before reading the reply, and both houses have put in writing that the practice saves everybody a fortnight.

Erevanth's charter predates the water records office, and Ravenscarp has spent nine years trying to have it read as a grant the records office confirmed rather than a right standing outside it. Erevanth answers each filing in the same four lines and offers no terms, because the orchard's draw is the one call on the seventh surface opening the records office cannot cap.

Erevanth's foundry casts the records office's cistern gates, sluice plates and pump barrels, forty tons a year to the Natron Shelves' own patterns. Ravenscarp is suing the charter and buying the castings in the same season, and treats the two as unrelated matters.

Ravenscarp finds Verrigan the working capital for the season at a twelfth, secured on the landing dues, and has renewed it every year since 811. Verrigan is quietly positioned for the day the ring stops mattering, Ravenscarp is not, and the loan is most of what keeps the two civil.

Valdrenne's loan book still carries 140 pledges on Ferravant grain wharves with no living name able to discharge any of them, so eleven debtors retained Ravenscarp to establish who may. The Natron Shelves has filed twice and been told the register is not amended for cold houses, which is the same answer its own practice depends on everywhere else.

Ravenscarp is retained to argue that Meketri is not land within Clause II because it appears in no survey, which suits Meketri exactly until somebody asks who holds the nine wells. The fee is taken in cattle delivered at Sekhemra, and the pleading is filed under Ravenscarp's own name.

Aelvarion has no fresh water on the silt island and holds two registered shares off the Pardah's seventh surface opening, carried down in cask by the boats that bring burial salt. The records office revises the rate in any year the surface opening runs late, and it has run late three years in five.

Every hundredweight of grain that reaches the Natron Shelves comes up the Pardah through Aelvarion, 4,000 a year with a pilot aboard for each load, because there is no way past the silt without one. Aelvarion takes a twelfth, and Ravenscarp has costed a road alternative four times in sixty years without finding one.

Vorlaine holds the cisterns at the fourth surface opening and Ravenscarp keeps the records office stair at the seventh, and the Natron Shelves have petitioned four times to have the upper draw capped in a dry year. Vorlaine is quietly positioned for the day the records office stops meaning anything, Ravenscarp cannot survive that day, and each of them knows which way the other faces.

Cuiveril has taught the records office clerks of the Natron Shelves for six generations, twelve at a time on a three-year course at forty crowns the head, and the reading of surface opening intervals is taught out of Cuiveril's own copies. Ravenscarp has asked for the copies and been offered lessons.

Vantrose has three times declined a Reach water share as security, on the ground that no Corvantine records office can produce a cistern sixty years later, and Ravenscarp has three times filed the refusal at the Forge as evidence for the security petition. Both houses profit if the Accords hold, both say so in writing, and they have been on opposite sides of this for eleven years.

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.

Ravenscarp's junior registrars spend a year at Ordwaine on seal seating order, since coast families buying burial on the Natron Shelves keep having the papers voided over the order the seals went on. The fee is paid in burial salt and in dry-rock storage for the archive's own dead, which no Amaseki house on the coast will admit to using.