Kazdrun

The charcoal carts go back up loaded, sixty bog-iron blooms a year to Naskarre's forge, set against the fuel account and reconciled each spring. Kazdrun has twice held the blooms back over a short sack count and Naskarre has twice stopped burning.

Naskarre burns the gorge woods below its own falls and carts nine hundred sacks of charcoal a year down to Kazdrun, which cannot fire a bloom on peat. The price is agreed on a tally-stick at the marsh road head and settled in cut lead at the gate, so both houses keep two sets of figures.

Vaskaryn's toll shed refused a Kazdrun freight contract in 809 AF because it came as a cut half-plate with no lodged copy, and forty tons of blooms sat on the shingle for a season. Kazdrun is suing at the Forge for the delay charge; Vaskaryn's defence is that a tally-stick and a half-plate are both unreadable to a records office, so neither party held a document.

Everything the works eat and everything they sell crosses Vaskaryn's landings, there being no other deep water on that coast: nine thousand tons of pig out a year and eighteen thousand quarters of bread grain back in the same hulls, charged by the load with a surcharge on winter bottoms. Vaskaryn has raised the load rate twice since the delay charge suit was filed and posted both rises on the toll shed.

Kazdrun's cast 1,400 iron cramps and sixty tons of sleeper shoe for the recutting of the stair below Stonewrit in 762, and has been paid for nine hundred cramps. Kazdrun recites the account at every clan assembly and files it at the Forge every ninth year, and Stonewrit's answer has not changed since 771: the stair is Kazdrunn ground and the work was a clan duty.

Bog iron out of Kazdrun's pits is barged up the Rooken to Ancarien's fen landing, forty tons a year in the six weeks the water stands high enough. Kazdrun bills in the Vaskarni measure it buys peat by and Ancarien pays in the weight its own forge books are kept in, and the difference has been argued since 803 AF.

Alder props and willow bundles go from Drusenberg to Kazdrun, eleven hundred props a year, which is what keeps the peat pits from closing on the diggers. Drusenberg bills by the bundle and Kazdrun pays by the pit, and the two counts differ every year.

Kazdrun cut a channel from its gate to the Rooken in 807 AF and now floats its blooms past the causeway head, taking about a third of Drusenberg's weir receipts with it. Drusenberg's case at the summer assembly is that the cut is a causeway toll evaded under another name, and the assembly has adjourned it twice for want of a rememberer who can recite the original grant.

Kazdrun buys three hundred quarters of bread grain a year at the Ferravant ford and pays the stranger's rate, which Skarveth's assembly set at a fifth over the survey table and keeps out of its minutes. Kazdrun pays it and has twice sent the difference to Ferrovane as a complaint about weights, which is not the complaint it has.

Kazdrun keeps a chartered company of forty men and its work comes through Maeryvane's rather than from anyone who will sign for it. Maeryvane has instructed Kazdrun in eleven matters since 796 AF, all entered under one charter number, and Kazdrun takes the instructions without asking whose money it is.

Thelanor's wardens keep the plank road and the alder crossings as far as Kazdrun's gate, twenty-two men on a summer rota, and Kazdrun pays in gate-iron and nails rather than coin. Neither house has told the Rookenmarsh assembly, which holds the causeways to be the assembly's to police.

Quellborne brokered the match that brought a Corvantine heir, raised Undivided, into Kazdrun in 799, and took its fee as a nine-year exemption at the weighing yard. At the clan assembly the heir is seated below the youngest gate-holder, may not answer for the gate, and holds Kazdrun as a wardship rather than by right, which four neighbouring holds have already put in writing.

The model loft at Draveholt takes two of Kazdrun's iron furnace masters each winter, and the fee is a tenth of the bog-iron output valued at Vurrgast's settlement price. Draveholt teaches pattern-casting and keeps the drawings, so Kazdrun can build to them and cannot sell them on.