The Signing of the Lease

Midsummer of Lease Year 1, on the flat stone at the top of the falls above the Tally Cliffs. The vale remembers it as a battle of wits that the Founder won. The lease itself records a negotiation in which both sides got what they asked for.

What happened

Queen Maudry, then a shepherd’s daughter of thirty-one who had grazed her father’s flocks in the Sallow Hills on the dragon’s sufferance, leading some four hundred families out of the famine in the lowlands, climbed to the signing stone with her sword on her back and asked the dragon who owned the valley whether it could be rented. Orpiment, who had held the vale as a hunting range for longer than anyone had counted, was curious enough to say yes.

Two copies were written, each sealed with amber wax stamped with a marigold and a claw. One went to the Crown and one went into the Founder’s keeping. The dragon cut the first groove of the Tally that evening.

What the vale forgot

That the arrangement was a lease, with a term and a rent, rather than a victory. By Lease Year 100 the songs said the dragon had flown away. By Lease Year 200 nobody alive had read the terms. The Crown’s copy was moved to Sealwright Hall after the High Water of Lease Year 161 and not opened with leave again until the Wardens opened it this summer.

Witnesses

Iveth Ammerly’s great-grandmother, an elf of the lowland migration, stood at the edge of the crowd on the cliff path and wrote one line about it in her diary.