Chapter Four: Crosswind Council

key

Council Hill kept a great slab of split pine that refused to pick a side, and it was there, under crosswind weather, that Boof brought the egg to be argued over. She slipped beneath the trestle, chin on the timber, and found herself nose to frame with the Fool’s Mirror—an upright pane of polished weather that returned not your face but the exact shape of your wanting.

The hill smelled of two weathers at once. Round the council ring stood seven posts, and on every post an iron weathercock, rust-red at the comb. They did not follow the wind. They turned toward whatever they favoured, and the wind followed them. The crosswind was only the weathercocks disagreeing, made weather.

Twice in living memory all seven had agreed, and the hill went so still that papers stayed where they were put. Nobody remembered the vote. Everybody remembered the papers.

At the head of the slab the crosswind loom worked without a weaver: dawn-wind for the warp, squall for the weft, the shuttle flying between them on its own. It wove the council's tablecloth an inch an hour, honey-gold and squall-teal, and when the vote turned, the weave changed colour.

Cut into the slab's edge, at nose height, was the hill's first law: &[boon, bane]{table}. The founders had chiselled it in bracework before the first argument, the way a joiner writes a joint before she saws, so it could be leaned on and checked while tempers were cool. Two sides in one frame, merged without whitening either. One table round the lot, like a room you agree to stay in.

Each delegate thumbed the braces before sitting, to be sure nobody had filed them open in the night. Nobody ever had. Boof sniffed the cut: resin and old thumbs. The ferry delegate thumbed it last, said “Two springs, one bed,” as if that were the whole of the law, and sat.

Above her, the law of the hill was recited as it had been recited for generations: every permission in Boon.land is a key, iron or brass, and a key may be filed smaller in the open, before witnesses, with the shavings swept into the honest jar. A key may never be grown in secret. The jar had never once been emptied, which the hill considered the point.

The Genie stood at the table's edge, hands folded, and added the one fact that mattered: a wish is the largest key ever cut. It opens the momentum of the world itself. That was when the bane-side chair creaked.

The bitter pie arrived by hired cart, lattice crust tight over berries he'd kept too long. He offered nobody a slice. The wish, he proposed, should be valued, filed, and sold to someone prepared to bear its considerable responsibilities. He paused to let the council imagine such a person. Then supplied his own name.

As the cart tipped, a berry worked loose from his lattice, plum-black with a thorn on its stem, and rolled across the pine to the youngest clerk's elbow. Boof smelled it before she saw it: cold, violet, a cellar smell, and under that something being said. On the hill they say a baneberry tells you what will go wrong, and that it goes wrong because you were told. The clerk heard, or thought he heard, that the wind would have his cap. So he took it off to keep it safe, and set it on the slab beside his chalk.

Nothing is argued on the hill until it has been written. Write it before you argue it, the founders said, and cut their own law first to show how. So while the pie was still being reasonable, the youngest clerk chalked his motion on the pine beside the law: [wish]{BaneWAP}. A window, with one man's room round it, where the law had a table. Nobody needed to raise a voice. Boof sniffed both. The law smelled of resin. The motion smelled of chalk, which comes off.

All round the ring the weathercocks swung: three to face the pie, three tails to him, the seventh spinning on its pin. The crosswind doubled, lifted the youngest clerk's cap off the slab where he had set it to keep it safe, and hung it in the gorse. Boof flattened her ears. She did not know how iron voted. She knew what it smelled like when it was cross.