Dream d1714-s: Amber Road, Forking Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road behind us still held the shape of Vesperhush in it - not the place itself, which had gone to grass and silence weeks before we arrived, but the impression it left in the soles of my boots, in the particular way the Weather Reader walked when she was still turning something over.

She had her barometer out even on the open verge, watching the needle drift. "Pressure's falling," she said. "Something heavy coming from the west before morning."

The Builder was ahead of me by a few paces, her hands clasped behind her back the way she did when she was calculating something she hadn't yet put into words. She'd spent her last Vesperhush morning tracing the old granary foundation with her boot, reading the settlement's final sentence.

"They knew how to drain water away from the footings," she said, not to anyone in particular. "Whoever built that, they knew."

I wrote it in the book. It felt important that the granary had outlasted everything else - the roofbeams, the hearths, the names above the doors. The thing that kept water moving was the thing that stayed.

Lano trotted alongside me, her nose close to the road's edge where the grass had grown tall and gone to seed. Her ears were up. She found something in the verge - a smooth river stone, pale and round - and carried it in her mouth for a while the way she sometimes did, as if the carrying itself was a kind of statement.

"Cachorra," I said, and she glanced up at me without stopping.

Rurik had gone ahead to the fork. We could see him sitting at the junction where the road split, amber eyes steady in the last of the light. He did not look at us. He was watching the road that led north, the one we were not taking, the way he always watched the road we were not taking.

"What do you think he sees?" the Weather Reader asked.

"The pressure changing," the Builder said, and there was warmth in it.

We made camp on the wide verge below the fork. The storm the Weather Reader had promised arrived in the small hours - not violent, just heavy, a long slow soaking. I kept the book dry under my coat and lay awake listening to the rain work its way through the grass. Rurik was still at the threshold when I looked, dark shape against the wetter dark, unmoving.

Ironbrook would be a day's walk in the morning light, if the light came clean. I wrote the date and the distance and left the rest of the page empty.