The Landlady's Landing
Participants
- Orpiment — lessor
- Queen Hesper — tenant
- Wystan Pye — offered gold
- Sir Ivo Latchford — challenged her
- Beatrix Holloway — held fire
- Kit Farrow — on the roof
- Odda Quarrel — in the bell tower
- Iveth Ammerly — taking notes
Noon on day 1, the first day of the Midsummer Fair in Lease Year 300. A dragon the colour of old gold came down the vale from the Tally Cliffs, carrying the Founder’s marigold pennant, and landed on the roof of the Wool Exchange in the middle of Summerhythe.
What happened
The Keep’s great crossbow did not fire, because Beatrix Holloway recognised the pennant. Orpiment settled on the leads beside the Great Tenor, greeted Kit Farrow on the roof and Odda Quarrel in the bell tower below, both of them there for their own reasons, and read aloud the opening of the lease in a voice that carried to the Keep. She named the term, three hundred summers, and the day the rent falls due, the Lammas moon. Then she asked the tenant to pay.
Wystan Pye offered her a chest of crowns in full and final settlement, and she declined it without heat. Sir Ivo Latchford challenged her to single combat, and she declined that too. Queen Hesper came down from the Keep, stood in the square, and asked what the rent was. The dragon told her that a tenant who must be told the rent has not read the lease.
As she settled, Orpiment shook the dust of the flight off her scales, and two dozen shed flakes fell into the square and woke in the heat of the fair’s bread ovens.
Consequences
- The Crown has forty days to pay a rent nobody at court has read.
- The Crown’s copy of the lease is not in the Keep, and has not been for nearly a century and a half.
- Four people who were on the roof, in the tower or at the ovens that day are now Wardens of the Lease.