Dream d1817-s: Gate at Grey Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning arrived without ceremony, just a slow brightening at the eastern fence-line and the smell of cold stone. Frost lay on the broken palings in thin white lines, and the grass between the flagstones held its shape like memory. I finished the last entry in the book of readings by the ember of a single lamp, pressing the words into the page while the others gathered their packs in the half-dark.

The Caretaker came out to see us off. She had been the only one who stayed through all the seasons Vesperhush had been going quiet, and she walked the perimeter of the yard once more the way she always did, checking the gate post, testing the hinge. The Builder watched her make that circuit and said nothing for a moment, then: "The east post will hold another winter. I shimmed it yesterday. You'll feel it in the swing."

The Caretaker looked at the gate, then at the Builder. She nodded once, which was as much ceremony as Vesperhush offered.

I closed the book and read back a line aloud - not for sentiment but to fix it. What I had written: the industry here was care, not construction; the silence was earned, not abandoned. The Weather Reader was rolling her barometer case shut. She tilted her head at that, and I saw her file it somewhere.

Lano had been sitting at the road's edge since first light, nose pointed outward, ears forward. She did not look back at the yard. She had already read the place and decided. Her tail moved once when I stepped through the gate.

Rurik went first, as he always does at a threshold. He stepped through without looking back, found the road's center line, and sat. Waiting. His amber eyes were already on the distance.

The Weather Reader fell in beside me and read the sky. "Pressure's rising," she said. "It will be dry until noon. After that I don't know."

I wrote that in the margin. The book has margins for things the Weather Reader doesn't know yet.

Vesperhush shrank behind us. One window, one gate post, one woman checking the hinge of a gate that now swings true. We had left it slightly better than we found it. The road ahead was long and had no opinion about that.