Pemba

Because that's the secret the fields carry, right there on their faces. Every field in Gullwick shows a number, and beside it, dots — pips — and the pips tell you how likely that number is to come up when the dice are rolled. A field marked with lots of pips is one the dice will land on often. A field marked with only one or two is one you'll wait and wait for.

"People forget to count," she told Idris once, tapping a field's dots. "They pick a spot because it's near the water, or because a friend's nearby, or just because it's the first empty corner they see. And then they sit there all season while the dice keep landing somewhere else." She shook her head. "A cottage only feeds you when its fields come up. So before I settle anywhere, I count the dots. Build where the good rolls land."

Idris smiled his slow smile. "And what did you find, when you started counting?"

"That some fields pay again and again," said Pemba, her eyes bright with it, "and some barely pay at all — and you cannot tell which from the number alone. A field of grain and a field of stone might sit side by side, but if one has six pips and the other has two, the six-pip field will feed me three times as often. The dots don't lie. The dice really do favour the well-marked fields."

She learned it the way most islanders do — by settling once beside a low-pip field and spending a whole season waiting on a roll that hardly ever came, watching her neighbour's high-pip corner pay out over and over. It stung. But it taught her the habit she never dropped again: count first.

Now Pemba builds where the dots are richest, and her cottages hum along, fed steadily, roll after roll. It isn't luck. It's reading the pips before she plants her stake, and trusting what they say.