Dream d2038-s: The Caretaker Stays

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the west wind had been at the barrow-walls all night, and by morning the ivy was speaking in long shivering runs, leaves turned silver-side out. We packed by the light of the single lamp we had left burning near the lintel. It was not ours to take.

The Caretaker found us before we found her. She came up the path from the lower precinct carrying two wrapped parcels, one for the Weather Reader and one tucked under her arm as if she had nearly decided not to bring it. "For the book," she said, setting a twist of dried stonecrop on my open page. "Something to press into it. So the page remembers."

I wrote the final entry at the gate. The Builder stood close, reading over my shoulder as she sometimes does, not commenting until I had stopped. Then only: "You got the weight of the keystone right. I wasn't sure you would." The stones of Willowbarrow were her primary concern, and that she had been uncertain was the closest she would come to admitting the place had surprised her.

The Weather Reader had already made her last notation in the instrument log. She told the Caretaker the pressure was rising now, that the clouds would clear by midmorning and the barrow would have a good dry day. The Caretaker nodded once, as if this confirmed something she had already felt in her knees.

Lano sat at the gate's threshold the whole time. She had her nose aimed west, ears high, reading the air ahead of us with a patience that shamed the rest of the party. Once she looked back at the Caretaker and her tail moved, just twice, and then she looked west again. Lista, I thought.

Rurik was through the gate before anyone spoke of leaving. He simply walked to it, looked back once with those amber eyes, and stepped into the verge-grass on the far side. The wind caught his fur.

We embraced the Caretaker. She did not hold on long; she was already returning her attention to the walls by the time we turned. Some people are the place itself.

I closed the book of readings. Behind us, one lamp still burned in the precinct. Ahead, the clouds ran fast and the grass flattened in long waves, and Rurik's black shape moved steadily west into the open.