Dream d2529-s: What the Hinge Remembered

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the shutter made a clean sound - dry wood settling flat against the outer wall - and Lano turned at the table because in eleven nights of repair-work the shutter had not made that sound before.

The pin was the last step. Two pins before it had proven wrong: the first too soft to hold the weight of the shutter in wind, the second too long to seat without binding. The third, cut to the right measure, had gone in last evening, and all day I had left the bracket alone to set. Tonight, on the eleventh night of the residency, I lifted the latch and let the shutter swing free, and it swung flat against the outer wall and stopped there, clean, the way a repaired thing settles when it is truly repaired.

The count required this.

The reading-house had stood with a compromised view for the whole of the week: the shutter catching at its frame, giving only the near angle, which read only the near end of the plain. The places the count required were further. To read Cinderfirth and Ivorymere and Nettleness, to read Elderhaven and Glenholt and Mistgarth and Sablegate - all of them, lit or cold - required the far view, and the far view needed the shutter flat. All those places had sat unread for eleven nights, not because their states were unknown, but because a reading taken on a broken instrument is not a reading. It is a record that cannot be trusted, and a record that cannot be trusted is worse than no record at all.

I did not begin the count tonight, and Lano settled where she was. The count would wait for dawn, when the light was honest. What tonight gave was only the sound of the shutter settling, and the evidence that the instrument was whole again.

Two seats were already marked in the ledger and would not be re-read: the Council Hall and the Scriptorium Annex, both closed, both noted with their dates, both filed. The columns for each were complete. I did not open them.

The open lines in the count ledger - three for the lit places, four for the cold ones - waited for dawn.

The week's best evidence, by the end of it, was not a reading. It was a small sound: the shutter clicking flat against the wall, the hinge doing what it had been repaired to do.

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