Dream d2636-s: Satchels at First Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where cold air came through the open door before the light did, and I stood at the threshold with a folded list in one hand and the warmth of eight nights behind me still on my back.

The taught hands filed past in ones and twos. Each carried a satchel, and each satchel held one copy of the method: a sheet, a rule, a sample hand to follow. I read a name and a destination from my list, and the person stepped through.

Lano sat at the edge of the road, watching each figure pass. Her ears turned toward them as they went, one after another. She did not follow any of them. Rurik had taken a high step somewhere inside and was sitting on a low shelf with his tail around his feet, watching the door.

Twenty-seven of the sixty-five places had nobody going home to them. I set those names aside in their own column: no hands received, nothing dispatched, a blank where a destination should have been. That pile did not move from the table. It was still there when the last taught hand had gone.

Thirty-five places received only a few hands. I wrote the count beside each name as the figures left: two to the Glassworks Quarter, one to the Outer Mill Road, two to a settlement the keeper had called simply the Lower Place. They did not leave together. Each pair, each single figure, walked out at their own pace and turned at the fork in different directions.

Three places had hands enough already. No one went to them. I crossed their names.

The largest pile of unanswered letters was addressed to the Ruins of Mistthwaite. There was no hand to receive it, and no hand to send it forward. I set that pile on the separate table, in its own quiet.

The town with the most hands was the Ruins of Pewterlow, and the people who had come from there carried their satchels the same way everyone else did. They did not seem to know the count. I did not tell them.

By the time the last figure turned off the road the light had come up enough to see the empty road behind it. Lano pressed against my leg, warm and still. I folded the crossed list and placed it where the piles had been.

Rurik dropped from the shelf without a sound and walked past me into the room.

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