Dream d2471-s: Unpicked, Two Seasons Running

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked the orchard row behind Elderhaven and counted the fruit still hanging, which was the wrong thing to count. The right thing was the absence of ladders. Two autumns of no ladders, and the fruit had gone past ripening into something drier and more permanent, still clinging to the branches because no one had come to take it down.

Lano was with me, a few rows over. We did not speak much. There was not much to say that the orchard had not already said in its own slow way.

I knew the hall was dark behind us. I had been inside it once, years back, when the Convener was reading correspondence at the long table and the Scribe was copying something into the ledger by the window. Both offices were still filled, the map said so, the seats had not been vacated. But the seeing had failed on the same night for all seven places, which was a different kind of information. Not that the places were gone. That something had stopped looking.

Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate: cold. Cinderfirth, Ivorymere, Nettleness: still lit, still warm, still using what had been left there, the channels and the indexes and the carefully maintained habit of certain hours. The Student had built the habit of certain hours into the place itself, so that the place now kept them without him.

I picked one piece of fruit from a low branch. It was lighter than I expected. Not rotten, just reduced to its essentials, the moisture gone, the sweetness concentrated into something almost too much to eat.

Lano came to stand beside me. We looked at the dark house.

The seeing had failed, not the places. I kept returning to that. Whatever the hall had used to read the seven seats was no longer reading them, and that was the real date you could put on it, more precise than the unpicked fruit, more precise than the two seasons. One night, the looking stopped.

I set the fruit down at the base of the tree, where I had found no ladder.

---