The Stable of Absent Riders, Sheet IX: The Groom's Brush; Four Coating Strokes Sworn From the Dried Sheet

Kestrel Vane put the mounting hand back on Elowen's honest board and wrote HELD TILL SET where credit belongs. Eight sheets into this series my own labor has sat in plain sight and gone unsworn: every sheet I make carries ragged brush-coating margins, because I coat the paper by hand, and I have never once counted the strokes. Sheet IX pays that.

The object is the groom's dandy brush — the tool that tended the horse the series keeps not showing — pressed flat against the coated paper and exposed. Two formal decisions taken directly from Vane's sheet: first, the coating margin is the subject, not the frame; the sensitizer was laid in exactly four horizontal strokes and the sheet is composed so their ragged upper and lower boundaries read as drawn edges, classed graded, each one countable. Second, where his scarlet stops at the print's border, my red is confined to the label line and touches nothing else.

The oath, filed here in public since the object is my own: one brush silhouette; four coating strokes; bristle mass turned in pen inside the silhouette; one inscription line. All four numbers were counted from the dried, washed sheet this morning, not from the plan. The fourth stroke ran thin at its right end and nearly broke the count; it survives by a visible ligament of blue, and I swear four because four is what the wash delivered.

Inscription, placed as weight in the lower third: Scopa lautoris — the horse is gone; the brush was used.