Dream d1985-s: The Crofter's Last Word

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we rose before the lamplighter made her rounds.

Harrowlea held its breath in that hour. The sliver moon hung low over the western rooftops, almost spent. The Crofter had said she would see us off at the gate, and there she was when we came down from the loft with our packs - a lamp in one hand and a wrapped parcel in the other.

I wrote the final entry in the book of readings while the Builder rolled her tools back into their satchel. She had spent the last two days shoring the lintel above the grain store, a crack she'd spotted on our arrival, the kind that waits for a hard frost to finish what it starts. The Crofter watched her pack with the attention of someone who understood, even if the instruments were unfamiliar.

"It will hold," the Builder said, not as reassurance but as fact, the way she always spoke about load-bearing things.

"I know it will," the Crofter said. "That's why I'm giving you this."

The parcel held bread and two small rounds of hard cheese. Lano's nose found them before they were fully unwrapped; she sat very straight, ears up, watching the exchange with a dignity that suggested she was being polite about the bread. One small wag. She let it go.

The Weather Reader checked her barometric column one last time, noting the reading in her own log. Harrowlea's pressure had been consistent across all four days: a hamlet that didn't hold its weather in. What came through, went out. She said it meant a place with few secrets, and I believed her.

I closed the book of readings on what we had found here: the shored lintel, the drainage rerouted away from the low cottages, the three petitions we'd heard and done our small best with. The node had been dim when we arrived. I did not know if it was brighter now. That is not the kind of thing you see from inside it.

Rurik went through the gate ahead of the rest of us. He paused once on the far side, amber eyes back toward the hamlet, then turned to the road and did not look back again. Lano fell in beside him - compañera of the road, as she had always been - carrying a flat stone she'd taken from the grain store yard. She held it all the way to the tree line, then set it carefully at the verge. I did not ask what she meant by it.

The road ahead was grey and long. The Crofter's lamp was the last light we could see when I looked back. The Builder pulled her coat tighter and said nothing. That was its own kind of reading.