The Moot's Charter

The Highbridge Trade-Moot's answer to every power that wants a door in the free city without a claim on its stones: license them. A charter buys a foreign house a bench voice, a fixed tithe-rate, and standing to recruit and trade under the Moot's law inside the walls, nothing more, and it can be closed by the same two-thirds vote that unseats a High Reeve.

Highbridge governs the way it does business: competence before blood, a bench for whoever can hold one, and a fee, charter, or vote standing in for whatever a crown would otherwise decide by force. The Moot's Charter is that same civic instinct turned outward. When the High Moot, the Stonewright Moot, or any other power beyond the Vale wanted a standing presence in the city that runs the lower world's roads, the Trade-Moot did not offer them a stone of the city, and it did not refuse them the door either. It wrote them a charter, the same instrument it already uses to seat its own guild delegates. Not every power took the offer.

A charter is short and specific. It licenses one house, in one place, for one chartering power, and it is renewed or revoked at the same Reeve-Day session where the benches settle the toll books. In exchange for the license, the chartered house pays a fixed tithe (set by trade volume, not by the power's reach: a galleries factor and a road-clan elder pay the same rate for the same size of room), keeps its recruiting, banking, and dispute-settling inside Moot law while inside the walls, and gets one seated voice on the appropriate bench when the matter touches its people. What it does not get is land, a garrison, or any claim that outlasts the paper. A chartered house is a tenant of the city's law, not a colony of its homeland's.

Most chartered houses keep to Charterhouse Row, the newest quarter in Highbridge, stepped in below the Guildrows where the terrace starts to level toward the market square (place.hb-charterhouse-row). A few powers never needed the Row at all. The Far College already held ground in the Guildrows generations before any charter existed, because its Vale-settled founders were never strangers here to begin with (faction.the-hanging-choir, faction.the-listening-college), and the Wheelmoot and House Ashwake keep looser rooms nearer their existing trade, because Reshi caravans and Asheni factors were doing business in Highbridge long before the paper caught up to the practice. One power was offered a charter outright and turned it down: the Keepers of the Deep hold the free-port of Sresh-Dar against every crown that has ever tried to license its salvage-rights, and signing a Highbridge parchment would have been the same surrender by another name. Their Highbridge clerk works out of the Tideward in the Underbridge instead, on the old terms, no charter at all. The charter, in the end, is bureaucracy doing what the Vale's older powers did with a keep and a banner: making a claim legible, revocable, and survivable for everyone at the table, for everyone willing to sign.