Dream d2018-s: Petitions, Sealed and Waiting

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the west wind came off the hills and drove the clouds fast enough that Marrowfold's lamplit windows flickered against moving shadows, light and dark trading places every few seconds across the main street cobbles.

I had been up early. Early enough to see the tracks.

They ran the length of the street and back again, pressed deep where a loaded cart had turned near the chandler's corner. Weeks old at most, the Weather Reader said, crouching to lay three fingers across the tread. Not the settled dust of a place gone still. Fresh work.

She stood and tilted her barometer toward the overcast. "The pressure has been holding," she said. "Whatever they've been building, they've had dry days for it."

Lano moved ahead of us, nose low along the tracks, her white tail angled into the wind. She paused at a side lane and her ears came up before we heard it ourselves: hammers, and voices cutting back and forth between them. Not construction exactly. More like argument conducted with tools.

We followed.

The Builder found the frame before we rounded the corner. She ran her hand up a new post, checked the shoulder joint with her thumb, and made a sound I knew meant it was good work. "Mortised properly," she said. "Someone here knows what holds."

The moot hall sat at the lane's end, its steps covered in sealed documents stacked in wire trays. Petitions, I guessed. Filed and waiting on something, or someone, or some decision not yet made. I counted the trays. I wrote the number down and then wrote a question beside it: waiting on what.

Rurik had gone ahead to the far edge of the settlement on his own, which was his habit. He returned as the Builder and I stood before the petitions, and he sat on the low wall beside the trays and watched us read them without speaking. That was also his habit.

At the far edge of Marrowfold, past the moot hall and the new framing, the testing ground opened: measured distances scratched into a long flat field, wooden targets, a line of paces cut into the turf. The apparatus of calibration.

I stood at the near end of the range and wrote three things: the petitions, the hammers, the measured paces. The Builder stood beside me, reading the geometry of the targets, calculating distances the way she always did, quietly and without being asked.

Lano sat at my heel. Quieta, for once. Even she seemed to understand that this kind of reading required silence.

Whatever Marrowfold was building toward, it was not finished yet. That was not bad news. It meant we had arrived while the thing was still becoming. The book was open. I kept writing.