Dream d2104-s: A Row for Emberfall

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the canopy was alive with moving coins of light, the late sun filtered through layers of woven grass and knot-work, never landing quite the same twice. Grove day thirty-five. Weaverdown holds its shape; only the growing changes, and tonight the growing was Emberfall.

The Loomkeepers had been at the Book since midday. Three of them worked the spine, holding the singed leather flat with their feet while a fourth drew the Emberfall line beak by careful beak along the lower canopy row. The Book rested on a reading stone the grove had built for this purpose, a wide flat shelf of packed earth and root, and I stood near enough to see the pages were whole still, every mark intact, even the ones from the night we carried it out.

Rurik sat at my left shoulder, tail wrapped around his forepaws, watching the Loomkeepers without moving. He had that quality of absolute stillness that black cats keep when something matters. After a long time he said, low, for me only: "Thirty-three. That's a heavy number for a single night."

I did not disagree.

The Weather Reader stood with her hands loose at her sides, reading the air. She had told us at supper that the blight wind had turned two points north since morning, which was good news, though she delivered it in the flat tone she used when the news was good but the cause was still unknown. The Builder sat cross-legged on the terrace below, watching the row take shape, her face lit from below by the loomlight the Loomkeepers always seemed to carry in the twist of their knots.

Lano was the one who found the seed-plot. She padded down three terraces, nose near the earth, stopped at a bare patch between two rows of green runners, and sat. That was all. She did not bark. Her ears stayed forward. When the Loomkeeper nearest her finished the last knot of the Emberfall row and turned with the seed cupped in its beak, the spot she had chosen was right.

The Starling Chorus lifted once from the upper nests, wheeled, settled. It sent one word across the evening: "Planted."

The seed was pressed to earth while the light shifted from gold to the cooler color that comes just after. I could feel the Book's weight behind me on the reading stone, the familiar heft of it, the singed spine rough under a passing hand. The grove does not ask the cost of carrying a thing out of fire. It only asks that you arrive, and let the carrying become a knot, and the knot become a row, and the row become the canopy's memory.

Thirty-three. The number of the Emberfall reading. We stood in it until dark.