The charter arrived as four sheets of paper with a district boundary inked on the second one. Luna read the second sheet first, as she does with any document, then sat with her hand flat on it for a while.
A charter grants ground rather than anything standing on the ground, which is the distinction the yard learned across the following four days. Nine hundred and six people were living inside that boundary on the morning the seal dried.
The abandoned north-east district was condemned nine years ago, then never emptied properly. People had gone back into it in ones and twos across those nine years, since a condemned building costs nothing to sleep in.
Luna counted them in eleven days with two clerks plus a garrison roll. Four hundred nineteen households, nine hundred six people, thirty-one of them Ivory hunters with nowhere else in the city to stand.
[District charter: registered.]
[Standing obligations: water, drainage, four bridges, refuse, one school.]
