Dream d1792-s: Gate at Our Backs

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the last morning at Marrowwharf came in grey and wet, and the drizzle had been falling so long the cobblestones had given up being dry.

We gathered at the inn's covered step before first light had properly decided to arrive. The Weather Reader had already been out - her barometric glass tucked under her coat, her hair dark with rain. She said the low pressure had been here three days and would sit another two. "The town holds moisture the way old wood holds damp," she told us, not unhappily, running a thumb along the instrument's brass casing. "It's in the joints."

The Builder heard that and looked up at the gate arch where we'd be passing through. She'd spent an afternoon two days ago pressing her palm to the keystone, her ear to the mortared seam. Now she just looked at it as one looks at something understood. "They recut the voussoirs in the last generation," she said. "Whoever did it knew the load was shifting." She meant it as a kind of praise.

Rurik was already beyond the gate. He stood in the road with the drizzle pearling on his black fur, tail low, patient. He had marked this threshold on our first night and now he stood on the far side of it, which meant something I had come to trust without needing to name.

The Bridgekeeper came out to see us off. No ceremony, which was the right choice - we had already said most of what needed saying over supper. He gripped my hand once, nodded at the party, and passed me the last thing: a small dried sprig from the gate garden, tied with cord, for the book of readings.

I added it there, on the final page we'd given Marrowwharf. Pressed flat against my notation of the gate arch, the drainage channels, the mill-water flow, the three petitions pending in the hall. The sprig made the entry smell of something green under all the wet stone.

Lano had been sitting at my feet while I wrote, watching the Bridgekeeper's retreat into the inn. When I closed the book and tucked it away, she rose, shook the rain from her ears, and turned toward Rurik and the road. Her nose went up once, reading the air beyond the wall.

The Builder fell into step. The Weather Reader checked her glass a final time, as a habit more than a need. I took one look back at Marrowwharf's gate, the banners sagging and dripping, one lamp still burning in an upper window of the hall. Then I walked through.

The road was long and grey and open, and Rurik was already a dark shape along it, moving ahead.