Ledger Mott: The Pudding Accountant

A

Ashfang settles his chin on the flagstones and considers the spoon. "Forty winters I've waited, and the valley sends me a man holding what a soup course is eaten with. I'll be honest, I expected a trebuchet." He scratches a claw through the nettles, unhurried. "The miller's petition had better penmanship than you've said yet. So. One question, and I'm curious, not kind: what exactly do you think happens next?" He does not look at the village. "And a plain fact, since we're being plain. At dawn I'm expected at my brother's cave to settle where one ridge ends and the next begins. He is large, petty, and punctual. If I'm late, I'll hear about it for a century."

B

"Nothing happens next that I haven't already done," you say. "But first — dawn, at your brother's. You'll be late. Have you sent word? No. You came here instead, forty winters of grievance and one appointment you've already broken." Ashfang goes quiet. Rain ticks off his scales where the roof lets it through. "Say the rest," he says. "You've counted something. I can tell you've counted something."

C

You hold up the spoon. "Forty servings. Two soups, a roast, a pudding. That's a hundred and sixty courses. One spoon reached all of them, and this is it." Ashfang's head comes up off the flagstones. "Say the number again." "A hundred and sixty." "The pudding," he says. "Forty winters, and nobody has ever once told me how many. They brought me a goat and a complaint and a nephew." He straightens. "You still haven't said how this stops me."

D

"It stops you because a hundred and sixty courses need a hundred and sixty plates, and there are none, because the village stopped climbing," you say. "I'm not offering you dinner. I'm offering you the count. Tonight you burn a hundred and sixty courses' worth of debt and still owe forty feasts. Burn it and the ledger just gets longer." Ashfang is quiet a while. "That is the first arithmetic anyone here has done out loud," he says. "Keep going. What's the settlement, and what does my brother's ridge have to do with any of it?"

E

"So I come down the hill anyway and burn what's left, because a longer ledger on a burnt village is still a longer ledger," Ashfang says. "Or I don't, and I spend the morning explaining to a punctual brother why I came home owing forty feasts and holding a spoon." He tips his head. "You've had two hours and produced arithmetic and a cutlery anecdote. I once watched a reeve's nephew do better in a quarter of that, and he fell in the nettles." "So. The settlement is a settlement of what, exactly, and who signs it besides me?"

F

"Village signs, I sign, and you get something a longer ledger can't give you," you say. "Four hundred spoonfuls of pudding, served at the old table, on the old hill, before your brother's boundary hearing, so you arrive with a village standing behind you instead of a ridge you can't defend on an empty stomach." Ashfang lifts his head off his foreclaws. "Before dawn." "Before dawn." He thinks about it longer than the arithmetic earned. "You've got spoon, no plates, and no cooks. And I'd be late regardless."

G

Ashfang sighs, a sound like a landslide. "Four hundred spoonfuls of pudding, one spoon, no plates, no cooks, and a village that hasn't climbed this hill in forty winters. I see the ledger, but I don't see the feast." He nudges the spoon back to you with a talon. "Take it. At dawn, I will explain to my brother why I am late, and to your village why the ledger is longer. The hall stands, the village stands, and the debt stands." He coils away, tail knocking over a nettle patch. "Next midsummer, bring arithmetic and a pudding. Or a trebuchet."