Dream d2085-s: The Builder's Open Palm

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sixteenth day at Weaverdown began with rain-work on the upper terrace.

The channel-lips had taken overnight water without cracking, mostly, and the first task was to walk the row and confirm each one before the sun had time to seal in a mistake. The Builder went ahead of me, her hands moving along the clay-backed walls, pressing where the clay had crept apart. I watched her stop three times. Each time she paused, I saw it: fingers curling toward something she had not brought, some iron thing, some instrument of force. Each time she let them open again and pressed instead with the flat of her palm.

"The Foundry would have set," she said once, to no one in particular.

"The Foundry is past," the Weather Reader said from the next row, stepping across a berm with Rurik beside her. He sat briefly on the berm edge, tail folded, watching the Hummingbird Wardens make their first pass of the morning. The same circuit, the same five bodies: east hedge to canopy strut to the shaded trough where ember-blight spores sometimes arrived on southern wind. They moved at the speed of something wound up and set running, and I found it steadying, as I always did.

Lano padded ahead into the planting rows, nose low, ears forward, working some scent the turned earth gave up. She circled one of the new staking posts with great care, sniffed its base, then sat and looked back at us. Whatever she had concluded, she seemed satisfied.

The Book of Readings rode in the canvas sling across my back. The singed spine faced inward; I had learned to carry it that way. I set it down once to help the Builder re-pack a channel lip, then lifted it again feeling the weight, which was the same weight it had always been and different since the Foundry, the way a thing carried through fire carries the fact of it forever after.

The Weather Reader called the afternoon warm and dry, good for the evening's work. She was right.

The loomlight turned gold as the Loomkeepers gathered at the east nest-row. Entry fourteen of the circuit: Rowanfield. They worked in the only way they knew, beaks and grass-thread moving faster than reading allows, knotting the name into the canopy row by row. The Starling Chorus wheeled once overhead and called a single note into the dark, not a word and not less than one, and by the time the sound faded the Rowanfield was in the terrace, named and placed and given to the grove.

The Builder stood at the row's edge with both palms open at her sides.

I did not say anything. Nothing needed saying.