Just a quick explanation of how Contracts work in general, for the viewers at home.
Contracts work by affinity. Because the True Fae made Contracts with these things, with darkness and stone, with dreams and with the hearth, a Changeling can sign on as, "Well, good enough, you're basically a Gentry in the making." Certain Seemings can get in easier to certain contracts, because they fit the description of the legal entity allowed to use the clauses.
Court Contracts are special because I would not, under any but the weirdest circumstances, allow a member of the Gentry to use a Court Contract. If they do, it should be the result of hacking or something fucked up going on that's the centerpiece of a story, rather than, "Oh, they have it." Court Contracts are, instead of deals that Changelings got into, deals that Changelings made. At some point, Changelings went out and got Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter to give them several different forms of sweetheart deals, no doubt at pretty high costs. You're let *into* these deals not by being a Changeling, like with all of the rest, but by the Wyrd recognizing that there's affinity going on here. Your best friends are all Fall Court, so we'll let you in on a few of their deals. You're the Fallest Fall to ever Fall, so of course *you* can get the five-dot clause.
Equinox Road introduces the possibility that you can make personal Contracts with various elements. Such as, for example, Gravity. But these deals have the drawback that you have to pay significant costs. The way I interpret all of this in a holistic way, the first Fall Monarch, way back when, was deeply bound by Fall and its requirements, just like the first Summer Monarch. Tied up in chains, as it were, by the power they seized, just as the Gentry are.
Except future people learning it aren't so tightly bound.
The Four Founders (and the founder of any court with its own Contracts) sacrificed themselves to some extent, becoming like the True Fae in the sense that they Embodied something, as the West, North, East, and South court's founders must have.
My own expansion on this, a sort of hypothesis I find interesting, is that these personal high-level Contracts can then be taught and spread.
The man with the Gravity Contract he made takes a lover, a beautiful young Changeling, and teaches him the Contract. The affinity that their love (and perhaps Merits representing this) had means that this lover might be carefully included into the line-item of the contract, in a reworked version of how Courts must work.
And then that lover, he takes a student, who no doubt has the "Mentor Merit" for said beautiful, clever Changeling. And that Student teaches his Best Friend, and suddenly you have a Contract that is not Universal (and thus the Gentry can't get their grubby little fingers on it), but that is wide-spread.
Of course, the dark inverse of this is that this means that there might be special Contracts that some of the True Fae have signed that Changelings don't know that they qualify for. Like a person not informed that they're part of a class-action lawsuit, and thus never knows they won some money out of it.[1]
[1] In this metaphor, incidentally, Pure and Unmixed Iron (called ignorantly by some "Cold Iron" or whatnot, long discussion of what exactly the book means here) won a class-action lawsuit for breach-of-contract on the entire True Fae.
