Dream d2046-s: Lantern Count, River Mist

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the river mist came in low and slow, and Harrowhollow appeared through it the way a thought appears before you've fully formed it - a suggestion of fence posts, then a gate, then the warm blurs of lamp-oil in windows.

We had been walking since midday. The Weather Reader held her barometer up to the grey air and read the settling pressure. "Stable," she said. "The place breathes easy enough." She noted it in her small black notebook before I noted it in mine.

Lano reached the gate first. She stopped, nose working the air in short rapid pulls, ears angled forward. Whatever she read in the mist she kept to herself - her tail moved once, slowly, and then she sat.

The gate was wooden, iron-pinned, standing open on one side. A good sign or a careless one; we had learned not to decide which until we had slept at least once inside a place. Two lanterns hung from the posts, both lit. Beside the left post a long-handled tool - a hay fork or a beet rake, impossible to tell in the mist - leaned against the fence at an angle that said forgotten rather than stored. The Builder crouched to look at the post's base without touching anything. "Mortise joint," she said, mostly to herself. "Someone knew what they were doing here. A while ago, probably."

Rurik went through the gate before any of us. He padded to the center of the dirt path beyond, stopped, and turned to look back at us with his amber eyes catching the lantern light. He sat. The threshold was crossable, he was telling us in his way.

We crossed it.

The hamlet inside was small enough to count. Seven structures, maybe eight; the mist softened the far end. Four windows showed orange light. Two were dark. A banked-hearth smell drifted from somewhere to the left - not woodsmoke, something damper, peat or turf. Somewhere a rope knocked against something hollow, just once every few seconds.

We found the inn by the sign rather than by size - it was not much larger than the structures flanking it. A woman of indeterminate age met us at the door, looked at the party once, Lano and Rurik included, and said nothing about the animals. She showed us rooms. We took them.

I sat on the bed's edge and opened the book of readings to a fresh page. I wrote: Harrowhollow. Arrival. River drainage fog, pressure stable. Seven or eight structures. Four lights burning, two dark. One stray tool by the gate. Reading begins tomorrow.

Lano jumped up beside me, turned twice, and settled with her chin on my knee.

"Quieta," I said to her, which was unnecessary. She already was.