The corduroy runs three miles past Bramble Stitch's gate and then gives up. From the last lashed log to the first standing wall in Cinder Row is another mile of ruts, and the ridge already has the light halfway off it. A pony walking empty can make the wall before dark. A pony with a cart cannot. The cart is sitting in the yard with the light going.
The Opportunity Desk issued the map at dawn. The line on it is blue, labeled Recovery Corridor, and it does not bend. It does not show the seam yard. The yard begins where the corduroy ends and runs to the ditch in a double file of tagged wagons. It was not on yesterday's map either. Bramble Stitch keeps the thorn gate. She has walked this ground longer than the desk has had a letterhead.
"They draw the road as if the seals were weather," she said. "Weather moves. The seals don't. The timber for a floor is close enough to smell, and I've got ponies sleeping under the sky where the floor was."
What the map leaves out is the rule Copper Gauge read off a card at the yard mouth. Blades may pass. Handles may not. A shovel, he said, is a tool. A handle is a shaft, and a shaft has to be interviewed before it can be trusted not to change jobs. The blades sit in a heap on the Cinder Row side of the ditch, in plain sight of the wall. The handles sit on the Grey March side, bundled, tagged, and dry. Nopony at the ditch has worked out how to dig a foundation with the half that cleared.
That is the hold. The desk announced the rebuild of Cinder Row before noon and called the thornwood an opportunity with room to grow. The Grey March keeps the only cart road down from the high pasture. It weighed the carts and sent the weight back. Rafters, lime, and window glass are in the file, the glass still in straw. The tender says the ward is open. The work is on the other side of the seal.
Sedge Pell was under the near wall when the old joist went. He had been told the props were on the road. He set his weight where a prop was supposed to stand. The joist broke. His off foreleg is splinted with a strip of door and a wrap Bramble Stitch cut from her own kit.
"I don't need them to name it," Pell said. "I need the twelve boards they weighed this morning and the handles for the blades I can see from here. I can see them. That's the mean part."
Gauge had the distance at forty paces from the tag post to the blade heap, and he seemed satisfied with the figure. "The separation is the policy," he said. "Once a handle is through, I cannot vouch for what it gets fitted to. The desk asked for speed. Speed is how a shaft changes jobs."
The card in his hoof has a column for intent. Timber is intent if it is long enough to span a room. Lime is intent if there is enough of it to set a wall. There is no line on the card for a room that is currently open to the weather.
A boar has taken the warm side of the lime. It comes out of the ditch at supper, gets under the tarp, and stays until a driver throws a stone. It comes back when the drivers sit. It has learned the hour. The drivers may keep the lime from spoiling. They may not move it.
Merry Charter of the Opportunity Desk stopped at the thorn gate. She had a second blue line and called the rafters a staging success. She said the March's cooperation was expected. Bramble Stitch watched the wagon turn on the good road.
Alder Gloss came as far as the first wall with a shovel painted like a medal. He set it in the ash and waited for a count of three. The blade was tin and moved nothing. He made the high road before the ridge went grey.
Bramble Stitch stayed at the gate with a glass on the yard. She counted nine roofs down to the first course and four wells that take only rain. The tags were still on the rafters when the light left the ridge. Pell's splint is the only new timber in Cinder Row tonight.
