This dispatch is nine miles above the last boarded post, on the cedar trail the Seasonal Hiring Roll calls cleared. Daylight is under two hours, and less once the timber closes. The map in the roll shows a ford. The ford is a silt bar. A cedar lies across it, and the water goes around.
The Office of Forest Opportunity released the moon's roll at noon, in a room with a carpet. The roll lists 1,840 hires on the northern contracts since the last full moon. Penny Ledger, the economist who splits official rolls against the bits that move, had the vellum apart before the carpet was down again.
Of the 1,840, Ledger counts 1,506 on day-rate lines for lead, survey, bounty, and guide. Stallions hold 1,441 of those lines. Mares hold 65. The remaining 334 mares sit in a column the office headed "present and useful." The column pays a bunk, a mention in the margin, and a meal if the cook remembers. Her figure for new bit-paying work this moon is 1,506. The mare share of that figure is 65 names.
One line in the useful column runs forty-one entries and is the same mare on every one. Lark Fen boiled oats for a survey crew for forty-one mornings. The office entered each morning as a hire. Ledger set the forty-one back to one. The useful column loses the extra forty, and the moon's total on her sheet comes down to 1,800.
Copper Gauge stamped the roll. "We hire availability," he said. "A mare can take any slip on the board. The forest is an opportunity, and opportunity does not sort the queue."
The board at the edge holds ninety slips. Six carry a mare's name. Three of the six read "see attached stallion." Those stallions have the day rate. The mares have the word assistant and a bunk if the camp has one left.
Sable Nightshade keeps the path from a cabin at the tree line. She has kept it through twelve seasons of rolls. She walked the nine miles this morning because the cedar is still down. "They hired a ridge," she said. "The ridge is where it was. Eleven ponies slept here last night. They live here."
Reston Hale holds the bounty for that ridge. The contract pays eighty bits a day and lists a partner as optional. His poster at the boarded post is nailed over last moon's poster, which is nailed over the moon before. He is in the Crystal Empire this week, speaking on woodcraft. The room served cake with a small axe done in icing. Hale told them the trail is a mindset. The cedar is where the thaw put it.
Lark Fen turned a fetlock on the cedar the third morning and kept the oats going through the forty-first. She stopped when the fetlock would not take a shoe. The support ticket pays the crew's oats. The splint is coming out of her jar at two bits a wrap. She is at Sable's cabin with the leg on a feed sack.
"They said I was hired," she said. "I have forty-one lines and a fetlock the size of a kettle. The stallion on the day rate asked me which way the ford was. I told him it was the tree he was looking at."
A dun ridge cat with a torn ear uses the cut in the evening. It comes down when the light drops, drinks where the current skirts the cedar, and goes back up the bank the day-rate crews were paid to grade. Six evenings running it has taken the same line. It steps over the log where Sable steps over it. The cat keeps the hour without a slip.
Ledger left her split nailed to the edge post. The carpeted room had nowhere to hang it. Day-rate stallions, 1,441. Day-rate mares, 65. The useful column, once the repeated mornings count as a single hire, is 294. Her sheet totals 1,800. The stamped roll still reads 1,840. Gauge said the difference sits in the column headers, and that the headers will be reviewed before the next moon.
An hour of light is left, maybe less in the trees. Hale's poster says the ridge is open. Sable's book says the cedar has been down since the thaw, a bridge for goats and a wall for wagons. The roll's map still draws the ford as a blue line and a little bridge. The bridge is the tree. Lark Fen's line still reads present and useful.
