Dream d2107-s: Named for a Deed

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the south wind carried something wrong.

I felt it before I saw it - a faint wrongness above the second terrace, a drifting darker-than-pollen speck that the loomlight caught and showed as a blight-spore riding the warm current off the ridge. Then one of the Hummingbird Wardens was there, exactly there, having swept the south circuit on the same schedule it ran yesterday and the day before, a blur of wings that did not slow or arc or deviate but simply snapped - one precise movement - and the spore was gone. The Warden completed its circuit and was already at the far row before I exhaled.

"Thirty-eighth morning," the Weather Reader said beside me, her instruments ticking as she drew the wind out of the air and set a number beside it. She writes every reading in the small leather log she keeps inside her coat. The number was ordinary. The morning was not.

This was a planting day.

We had learned the rhythm by now: Loomkeepers at the canopy before light, beaks working the grass-thread in silence, reading the ledger out of the Book and knotting it upward into the nest-rows before the grove workers arrived. I carried the Book of Readings down from our shelter under the eastern eave, the weight of it familiar now, the singed spine rough under my thumb where the Foundry's heat had caught it. The pages inside were whole. They always will be.

The Builder had been at the terrace since before dawn, pressing her hands into the soil in the careful way the Loomkeepers had shown us - not forcing anything, learning the give of each layer before committing the seed to it. Rurik sat at the terrace edge, his black tail curved around his feet, watching the furrow she was opening. "A little deeper on the south-facing rows," he said. "They drain faster." She moved her hands without argument and the soil accepted them.

Lano had found a patch of canopy-filtered sun at the upper terrace and was simply there, nose on her paws, watching us all work. She stirred when the Warden passed overhead and settled again. "Quieta," I said, though she was already quiet.

At the seventh bell the Loomkeepers moved to the center of the canopy with the Book open in my hands below them. I held it steady while they read the Kestrelbarrow entry - thirty-sixth of the circuit - each beak-touch a translation I could not follow, only witness: grass-thread rising, a new knot, a new row beginning to carry that name. When the reading was complete, the Kestrelbarrow seed went into the third terrace, pressed in by the Builder's hands.

"Thirty-eight mornings," the Weather Reader said again, writing the final number.

The grove does not change. Only what grows in it.