Dream d1756-s: Mist on the Fork Road

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ran ahead of us in a gauze of river mist, the kind that clings to the low places and makes the verge grass look like it is breathing. Juniperbarrow was behind us now, its broken outline erased by the fog, and Pewtergate had not yet shown us even a suggestion of its glow. We were between, which is its own kind of country.

The Weather Reader walked with her smallest barometer held loosely at her side, watching the needle the way other people watch the horizon. "Pressure dropped three points since the bridge," she said to no one in particular, and then to me: "That means the mist runs deep tonight. It is not burning off."

I wrote that down. Not because it mattered to the reading of any particular place, but because I had started to feel that the road between places was itself a place, and that our book of readings should have pages for it.

The Builder had her hands in her coat pockets and was looking at the condition of the road surface. She catalogued it under her breath - stone-set here, gravel-patched there, one stretch where someone had driven planks into soft ground and the planks had rotted and sunk. "Juniperbarrow maintained this stretch once," she said. "You can tell by the style of the work. The same hand that set the floor joists in the old hall."

"Gone," I said.

"Gone," she agreed, not sadly, more like confirming a measurement.

Lano trotted at the edge of the road where the grass was still damp. Her nose worked the mist continuously, reading things none of us had instruments for. She found something in the long grass - some small thing the ruin had relinquished, a smooth grey stone - and carried it in her mouth for a while before setting it down at the verge.

Rurik was ahead of us when we reached the fork. He sat in the middle of the split road, exactly at the point where the paths diverged, and he did not move. His amber eyes swept the dark down the left branch, then the right, and then he looked back at us.

"He has not decided," the Weather Reader said.

"He is reading it," the Builder said.

We made camp on the wide verge near the fork, where the grass was high enough to cut the wind. No fire - the mist was too close for smoke to go anywhere useful. We ate cold and talked about Juniperbarrow: the things we had mended, the one we would remember, the light we had not been able to re-kindle because there was nothing left to anchor it to. You cannot re-light a place that has finished being a place.

Rurik did not come to camp. He sat at the fork all night. By morning his choice would be made, and we would follow him into whatever country Pewtergate turned out to be.