Dream d2096-s: The Opposite of Forging

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the grove made no demands on us and for once we let it not.

The Book lay closed on its flat stone - the singed spine facing up, still dark at the edges where the Foundry's last heat had caught it. We had stopped turning it face-down out of some unspoken courtesy to that damage. Rurik sat beside it with his tail curled over his paws, not watching it exactly, watching the middle distance the way cats do when they are in fact watching everything.

The Weather Reader had her instruments out of their pouch and on her knee, but she was not reading them. She was just letting the afternoon pass through her. She said, quietly, that the barometric needle had not moved since morning, which she described as a gift. The Builder had her hands open and empty in her lap - I noticed this because her hands are almost never empty. Lano was pressed against my side, her nose moving once every few minutes with whatever information the grove air was carrying to her. I could feel her breathing slow into the afternoon's pace.

Above us a knot in the nest-row came loose. I watched it happen: one loop, slack, and then one of the Loomkeepers came along the strand with the unhurried certainty of something that has never wondered whether it could do its work. Beak and grass-thread, beak and grass-thread. The knot was itself again before I had decided whether to point it out.

The Hummingbird Wardens passed through on their circuit at mid-afternoon, their path so exact it was like watching a clock you could feel rather than read. They did not look at us. They did not need to.

The grove made its sound. I had been hearing it for twenty-seven days and had called it various things - rustling, settling, the canopy-loom's work. Today I understood it was growth: cells deciding, tendrils finding, a thousand small persuasions happening at once. The Foundry had pushed. This place drew. The same result arrived by the opposite method, and for some reason that made me very tired in the good way.

At dusk the Loomkeepers gathered at the eastern row and we sat up without being asked. They took the Book - the Builder carried it over with both hands, that weight again, that still-warm spine - and they worked through the Umberfold entry, twenty-fifth of the circuit. A knot per name, a row per stay. The seed went into the terrace ground by the south hedge, pressed in by a beak, covered with a heel of foot. Lano watched this with her ears forward. Bueno, she said softly, to no one in particular. The canopy caught the last light and held it a moment longer than the sky did.