She held nineteen miles of sea-wall for ten years. Then the College decided the fee under it was redundant.
The survey took two years and eleven surveyors, and on page two hundred and six there is a column nobody was ready for: against two hundred and eleven works in the realm, a fee and a living practitioner. Two provisions where one would do.
The Council's answer is fourteen words long. Sign the consent printed on the back of your renewal form and the fee under your work is recovered. Refuse, and your licence is rescinded — and the fee is recovered anyway. Nobody is compelled. Everybody chooses. There is no flaw in it, and Iona Halloway has looked for one for four months.
She is one of the two hundred and eleven. She is also the reason the column exists: her own return, filed in a temper three years ago, is the proof the Council needed that a wall can be held with nothing underneath it.
The notice goes out over the signature of the Registrar of the Repository. Corvin Aldreth has the only office in Ordrey that could quietly lose a form, no internal reason left not to, and one true thing to tell her that no document in the realm can confirm.
And in the archive, in a japanned tin box catalogued in the year one-eleven as "not catalogued", is the instrument the whole College stands on. Four skins, eleven names, and a seal they cut for themselves because they had none.
Its first line reads: We being agreed.
There is no grantor. There never was.
What the College Revokes is the third book of The Proctorate: about a woman with no licence left to lose, a man who cannot prove a single thing about himself, and forty-one thousand people who each put a stamp on a letter on the same morning.