Dream d1809-s: Amber at the Fork

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road held the heat long after the sun had gone, dust sitting in the air as though it had nowhere to be. Kestrelsquare was behind us, its walls already smaller than my thumb held against the road's vanishing point, and Nettlesquare was still theoretical: a name in the book and a mark on the Weather Reader's chart.

Lano trotted ahead of us all, nose low, reading the road's margin with more patience than any of us could manage. Twice she veered into the dry grass at the verge, came back with her ears tipped forward, as if the grass had reported something worth noting.

"The pressure dropped," the Weather Reader said. She did not look up from her instruments. "It happened just past the southern fork. Kestrelsquare sits in a pocket, holds its weather longer than the surrounding land. Once you leave it, you feel the change."

"I felt it," the Builder said. She had her notebook out, sketching as she walked, a habit I had stopped questioning. "The granary wall. That was the thing that will stay with me. The way they had shimmed the foundation three finger-widths and never remarked on it. Just shimmed it and moved on."

I wrote that down. The shimmed foundation. The blocked eave-drain the Weather Reader had found, redirected decades back into a barrel everyone had forgotten was meant for runoff. The petitions board, half the slips still folded tight. We had read the place slowly, as it deserved, and left it with a few joints mended and some weight redistributed. Whether that counted as help, the book of readings would have to say in time.

Rurik walked wide of us all evening. When we made camp on the verge, a flat stretch where the road-grass gave way to gravel and the crickets changed register, he did not curl up as he sometimes did. He went instead to where the road divided, one fork bending south toward lowland farms, the other continuing straight toward Nettlesquare, and sat and watched the dark between the branches. His amber eyes caught no movement that I could see. He watched anyway.

"Lano, tranquila," the Builder said, very quietly. Lano came and settled against her legs. The small dog's breathing evened out into sleep before any of us managed it.

The Weather Reader made her last notation and closed the instrument case. I wrote the day's date in the book and left the page for Nettlesquare blank.