The placement book at Town Hall opened on a blank wage column and a penciled 11. The 11 was bits. Nim Halder, the investment clerk, had labeled it a holding cost: feed for one young pony for one day. Under the note sat 1,840 names, most of them under twenty-four. Mayor Pippin Pines had the book bound in a gray cover and carried it into a morning with South Range Holdings the way a seller carries a parcel map.
South Range had sent two partners and a surveyor. The ask on the first sheet was 9 million bits over four years for a youth absorption works: sheds, a training yard, and a gate with room for a plaque. Wages, the sheet said, would be set by the partner once capacity was placed. Halder's letter said another season of idle hooves would break the town ledger. The shops and orchards already paying the season were absent from the letter.
Sable Croft had carried her share in coin. She runs the Hearthstone Smithy on two hammers and a coal shed, pays her striker 38 bits a day and her apprentice 22, and keeps a tin on the rafter for the weeks the bank charges a counting fee. On Monday a runner from Ponyville Property Pros tacked a notice to the shed. Parcel 4, the fallow strip where the coal sits, had been optioned as a viewing terrace for the absorption works. The notice allowed the shed to stand through the tour if the doors stayed shut and the striking stayed quiet from ten to noon.
"They can have the quiet," Croft said. "The tin is the week I already paid. That is wages, and it stays off the terrace."
Property Pros had marked fourteen parcels the same way, most of them edges of ground already in use: the cider lane, a drying green, the fence the Ponyville Education Board had been calling a campus. A memo in the back of the gray book put readiness at 94 percent. Ready meant a morning titled Meeting the Investor's Eye, a clean fetlock, and an hour upright. Zephyr Windbreaker had done the hour. He is twenty, takes the dawn weather shift when the roster carries his name, and is listed between a feed-store filly and a colt held as pending craft for eleven months.
The contract exhibit ran to one page. It carried a line for South Range, a line for the Mayor, and a box that read "worker, upon selection." The box was empty. The 1,840 names stayed in the table at the front. Halder told the partners that selection would follow commitment, and that commitment would follow a Thursday walk of the parcels. Thursday is also the day the dawn shift pays, on the weeks the shift pays.
Marlow Vetch, the South Range partner who spoke, held the book open at the holding-cost page and kept his eye on the 11.
"The labor is already priced below any wage we would post at home," Vetch said. "Add a ribbon and a gate and you have a program. We can live with synergy if the feed number holds."
Pines nodded the way a seller nods at a bid. He offered a holiday on the works levy for the first six seasons. He offered to send any pony the partner set aside back through the Education Board, so the readiness figure would hold at 94. A second pass meant a second morning upright. He said opportunity twice and left the wage for the partner to set.
Windbreaker spent that hour on the weather-office roof, tying a loose flashing the clerk had logged as training. Training left the hour off the pay sheet. Three hours from the week before sat the same way. He wrote the invoice on the back of a roster scrap. "If I wait for their form, the week stays blank," Windbreaker said. The roster office files the form it prints, and it had printed him none.
By afternoon Halder ruled a fresh line under the 11. Where a family kept feeding a placed pony, the holding cost could drop, and the thinner number would sweeten the return he meant to show South Range. The revision went to the partners before it went anywhere else. On the rafter at the smithy the tin sat 22 bits light, the apprentice's day, because Croft had told him to keep striking through the quiet. She copied the 22 onto a scrap and slid the scrap under Property Pros' notice, so the figure would be on the wood when the terrace talk reached her door.
