Dream d1815-s: Rurik at the Fork

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road widened for a moment and then narrowed again, and Brackensquare was gone behind a low ridge of scrub oak and stone wall. We had not spoken for an hour. The cart ruts in the mud were old and the verge grass was high on both sides, and Rurik walked ahead with his tail low, reading the dark.

The Weather Reader stopped and held her barometer at arm's length toward the south. She said the pressure was dropping faster than it should for a clear night, and that meant the hills ahead held more weather than they showed.

The Builder said she had been thinking about the granary lintel at Brackensquare - the long crack that ran diagonal from the sill, the way the settlement's miller had shrugged at it and called it an old house doing what old houses do. She said it was not that. She said the footing had shifted under the east pier and the crack was the wall telling you something the ground had already decided. She had marked it in her ledger and left the miller a written account.

I wrote the name Brackensquare across the top of a fresh page and below it I wrote what we had read there: the granary pier, the weaving hall with its south light that came in wrong, the well whose cover someone had replaced with green timber, the children who gathered at the eastern gate each evening to watch the road out. We had stayed long enough to read the place truly. That was all the work asked of us.

Lano padded alongside the ditch edge, nose low, stopping at intervals to read the verge. Her ears came up when an owl crossed the road ahead.

Rurik sat down at a fork we had not noticed forming. He sat precisely at the point where the two paths divided and looked back at us, amber eyes steady.

The Weather Reader said: left goes toward lower ground, water somewhere in the trees. Right keeps the ridge. She said right would be slower but drier if the pressure kept falling.

The Builder looked at the road surface on each branch and said right was harder packed, more traveled in the recent season.

I said Vesperhush was east and uphill by the map, and we took the right branch.

Rurik rose and went ahead without ceremony. Lano shook herself once - a small decisive gesture - and followed.

We made camp in a gravel lay-by where someone had left a ring of hearthstones. The fire caught quickly on dry grass clippings someone else had bundled against the base of a post. Beneath the sliver moon the road ahead was pale and went into trees and disappeared. Rurik sat at the edge of the firelight where the dark began and watched that direction, unhurried, through the whole first watch.