Dream d2106-s: Ironbrook in Gold Thread

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Starling Chorus lifted off the nest-rows at the precise moment the light went copper, and I felt that I understood something about the grove's sense of time.

It wheeled once, wide and flat, a single dark shape pressed against the pale sky. Then it called, and the call was one voice spread across a thousand throats: "The western terrace holds. The blight wind has not turned. The stranger count: none." That was all. It banked east and settled back into the upper canopy like a stone finding the bottom of a pool.

The Weather Reader had her barometric glass out before the last echo faded. She stood with it tilted in both hands, reading the column in the gold loomlight that filtered down from the woven canopy above. "Two millibar drop since morning," she said. "Exactly what the Chorus called." She said it the way she says most things, factual and faintly wondering, as if the match still surprises her even after thirty-seven days of it being exact.

Lano had her nose lifted, tasting the same air the Chorus had just named. Her ears were forward and still. Whatever she found in the wind agreed with everyone else, I think, because her tail moved once and she settled at the Weather Reader's feet.

The Builder crouched at the terrace lip and pressed one thumb into the soil beside a graft she had been watching since we arrived. The stem was a pale green union now, the scar almost invisible. "It took," she said. "No force. Just time and the right angle." She looked pleased in the specific way she looks pleased when something persuades rather than submits.

After the dusk meal, the Loomkeepers assembled at the reading-post with a length of undyed grass-thread and the singed Book. I handed it over. Even after thirty-seven days the Book's weight still settles in my arms like something that knows it nearly wasn't here. The spine is blackened at the top corner, brittle if you press it, but every page is whole.

Rurik sat beside me with his tail curled around his forepaws, watching the Loomkeepers read. They do not read aloud. They read with their beaks: one beak touches a line, another beak draws thread, and a knot forms. A row for Ironbrook, entry thirty-five of the circuit, a settlement that traded in riveted copper and kept its water clean. Three knots for the three wells. One long crossing-stitch for the river.

When the seed went into the terrace it went quietly, the Loomkeeper pressing it in with the flat of a wing, no ceremony except the hush the whole grove seemed to hold.

Lano put her chin on my knee. Rurik said, quietly, "Thirty-seven days. The grove does not change."

"Only what grows in it," the Builder said.

The canopy above held the new knot. The Chorus was already asleep.