The Wound Spring

The loose reading asks who put the force there rather than when, and answers that a spring a person wound is that person’s force still, sitting where they left it. A device carried loaded is therefore no different in kind from a bow held at draw, and the distinction the other two schools insist upon is held to be a disagreement about clocks.

It is the reading of the free ports and it is very seldom committed to paper. At Kestrel a spring wound ashore and carried aboard still loaded passes as unremarkable on most wharves, and Kestrel is a signatory to nothing, which is the usual explanation and not a complete one, since the position turns up quietly in a good many places that have signed.

What keeps it alive is not its own strength. No signatory has ever endorsed the reading and none has ever formally challenged it, and the reason is that a challenge would have to fix the precise moment at which force stops being the wielder’s and becomes the weapon’s. That moment cannot be fixed without deciding what a geared bow is doing, and deciding what a geared bow is doing endangers the common reading considerably more than it endangers this one. So the majority leaves the question shut, and the loose reading goes on being tolerated by people who do not agree with it and cannot afford the argument.

Its adherents know all of this and are not embarrassed by it. Their position is that the system has run on an unexamined compromise for three thousand years, that everyone concerned is aware of it, and that the only real difference between the three schools is how much each is prepared to say out loud.