Dream d1717-s: Fresh Tracks in Frost

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the frost had come down hard in the night, and by first grey light the fences of Ironbrook were rimed white and the rooftops breathed mist into a still sky.

I was awake before the others, or nearly. Rurik had claimed the threshold of the inn door before me, sitting with his tail wrapped around his feet and his amber eyes already moving along the main street. He marked it the way he marks all thresholds - complete attention, no hurry.

"There," he said, or seemed to say, because he stood and walked three careful paces into the street and stopped.

I followed him out and saw what he had seen. The frost across the main street was not unbroken. Tracks cut through it - boot-prints, and the pressed lines of a loaded cart - recent enough that frost had not yet recovered the edges. Days old at most. In the middle of what I had half-imagined as a quiet place.

The Weather Reader came out behind me, her barometer already in hand, the brass cold enough to fog with her breath. She walked past the tracks without looking down at them, reading instead the quality of the air above the rooftops. "Pressure's been steady three days," she said. "Whatever work is happening here, it hasn't brought a storm with it."

The Builder crouched over the cart-tracks, tracing them with two fingers the way she traces a joint to read its age. "Heavy load. Timber or stone. And there -" she pointed further along - "the mortar scatter. Someone has been pointing a wall in the last week." She stood and looked up at the row of buildings facing us, reading their lines the way most people read faces. "That roof-ridge. The sag has been braced. Recently."

Lano had trotted ahead along the tracks, nose working the frozen ground, ears up and interested. She paused at the corner where the cart had turned, looked back at me once, then continued her investigation in the direction of the low hammering that had started up somewhere past the mill.

I opened the book of readings and wrote: Ironbrook - day 3. Tracks in frost. Cart-load, mortar work, braced ridge. Settlement in active repair. The place is not going quiet - it is correcting itself.

The Builder read it over my shoulder. "Write that it's good work," she said. "Whoever is doing this knows load-paths."

I wrote that too. The hammering continued past the mill, unhurried and methodical, and the frost slowly left the fences as the light came up over the rooftops of Ironbrook.