Dream d2039-s: Amber at the Fork

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the dust of the Willowbarrow road still clung to the backs of my hands when we stopped to eat. We had not yet found a fire by then - the sun was low but not gone, and the verge grass stood knee-high and dry on either side. The Builder set her pack against a milestone and pulled off her boots. She studied the sole of one, where grit from Willowbarrow's courtyard stones had pressed a pattern into the leather.

"We'll carry that place a while yet," she said.

The Weather Reader was turning the drum of her barometric gauge slowly. The pressure had been dropping since midmorning. She said nothing about it, which meant nothing alarming - only something worth watching.

Lano trotted ahead to where the road forked and sat there with her ears forward, nose working the warm air. She had a small flat stone in her mouth she'd found at the edge of Willowbarrow's last standing wall - had been carrying it since we crossed the threshold out. I did not know why she chose it. She always knew.

I wrote in the book of readings while the Builder and the Weather Reader made camp: what we had found in Willowbarrow, what we had mended, who would carry the mending after we were gone. The foreman who had laughed at the Builder's structural questions until she asked to see the eastern granary's beam joints. What he had not laughed about after. I wrote the name of the lamplighter who had kept one small lamp burning in the ruin for reasons she did not explain and did not need to.

The Builder called across the camp. "You're writing the lamplighter twice."

"She deserves it."

Rurik appeared at the fork when the sky went properly dark. He had not been there and then he had, which was his way. He sat with his back to us, amber eyes on the branching dark, and did not come to the fire. We left space for him in our arrangement of sleep. The road toward Ospreygreen went left; the right fork was not labeled on any marker I had found.

I asked the Weather Reader what pressure the night carried.

She looked up from her instruments. "Dry. Something building at distance." She put the drum back in its case. "Ospreygreen will have its own weather. We'll read it when we're in it."

Lano set the flat stone down at the edge of the fire's light, curled around it with her chin on her paws, and slept. Calma, I thought. We will know the place when we arrive.