Dream d1848-s: Amber at the Fork

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ran west and the clouds ran faster than we did, and Quillmoss shrank behind us into a grey smudge against the treeline.

We had been walking since early afternoon. The Weather Reader kept one hand on the aneroid strapped to her pack and called the shifts as they came - a drop at mid-road, a steadying as the wind swung south, then the west gust again that had been with us since the ruins. Lano trotted ahead, nose low, reading the verge in her own way, ears swiveling at sounds we didn't catch.

"There was a woman at the mill," the Builder said, not to anyone, to the road. "She knew exactly which beam was failing. She'd known for a season. She was waiting for someone to ask."

I wrote that in the book while I walked, which I have learned to do without looking at the page. The ink runs a little in wind like this, but the record holds.

We had been at Quillmoss long enough. Long enough to read the silence under the noise, the load-bearing joints in what remained, the way the lanes still held their old direction even where the buildings were gone. The Weather Reader had logged two distinct pressure systems that lived there and said the place breathed in halves: the orchard side exhaled at dusk, the mill side at dawn. I did not know what that meant yet but I had written it down.

"The aneroid's climbing," she said now. "Slow. Something settled in the west overnight."

"Umberstead?"

"That or just the season changing its mind."

We made camp where the road forked. There was a verge wide enough for the packs and a low wall, old enough that nothing was stamped on it. The Builder checked its joints by touch while I laid the fire, and said nothing, which meant they were sound.

Rurik found the fork before we did. He was sitting at the angle where the two roads split when we arrived, amber eyes open to the dark down the left branch. He did not look at us. He did not look away from whatever he was watching.

"Which one?" I asked him.

He blinked once, slowly, the way he does when the answer is not yet.

Lano circled the fire twice and settled against my side, her nose on her paws. One ear stayed up.

I opened the book to the page for Umberstead and wrote the date at the top and left the rest empty, the way you leave a cup out when a guest is coming.