Dream d2493-s: The Pot and the Wind

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was standing in Ivorymere's kitchen at the hour when one shift hands work to the next, and the argument in progress was about supper.

It was not a large argument. Someone had forgotten to pull the late-season roots from the cold-store, and someone else had decided without asking that grain-porridge was adequate for a night like this, and a third person disagreed about what a night like this required. Steam was rising from two different pots. The outgoing workers were untying their aprons. The incoming workers were retying theirs. The lamp above the cutting-board made everyone's faces the same color of tired.

No one mentioned the Student.

Not once, in the full rotation of the argument - who had forgotten the roots, whether the porridge would stretch, what ought to be done about the woman who always over-salted - not once did anyone reach for his name or his old office or the fact of the desk in the Scriptorium Annex that had been his, and was now simply a desk. The kitchen moved around that absence the way kitchens have always moved around absences: by continuing.

I stood near the door and understood this was the healthiest thing I would see all night.

Lano was near the hearth, lying flat, watching the door. Not sleeping. The ears went first - flat, sideways, the small angle that means attention. Then she was on her feet. Then the bark: one note, decisive, facing the outer wall rather than the room.

The tall signal-poles on Ivorymere's north hill were the first things to bend. I could hear them - a low flex and complaint, carried on a wind that had not been there when I arrived. The rain came second: not gentle, not a warning kind of rain, but the kind that arrives already knowing it intends to stay. The channel-paths cut into the slope below the settlement - the deep-dug ones, laid in for carrying and for keeping contact with the far places - began to fill. The great lamp at the hall-post on the outer terrace guttered, caught, guttered again.

In the kitchen, someone found the roots after all - behind the wrong barrel, where they always ended up in autumn. The argument shifted registers: vindication now, and counter-vindication, and the question of who owed whom an apology. The porridge pot kept simmering.

The wind did not stop.

The Convener's Hall was still lit across the water. The Scriptorium Annex kept its window. In the north somewhere Cinderfirth was burning its own lamps, and Nettleness too - I could not see them but I knew they were there in the way you know things in dreams, without evidence, without needing it. Elsewhere: Elderhaven, Glenholt, Mistgarth, Sablegate - the seeing had broken from the Hall on the same night, all four, as though the Hall's vision had blinked and not reopened. Not the places themselves. The seeing.

Lano stood at the door and watched the storm.

The kitchen argued about the apology, and no one looked up, and the lamp held.

For now.

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