Dream d2655-s: Eight Lit from the Road

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked the thin-handed country on its only road, and the road was cold underfoot and the sky was open in all directions. Lano walked beside me, her breath visible, her nose low and then high, reading the air that lay across the open ground.

I stopped where a stand of elder broke the wind and counted the lit windows I could see without walking toward any of them. Eight. I wrote the number in the margin of the ledger: eight lit from the road, the road being the only road, night three of eight.

To the east the Ruins of Pewterlow stood where it always stood, and it was the one place that showed more than a single window lit. Three windows there, or something that resembled windows - the Ruins of Pewterlow had the most hands of any place on the map and some of those hands had stayed. I did not go toward it. The road was my position. I marked which direction the lights were in, not whose they were.

Lano sat at my feet and looked toward the cold places as if she could smell the difference between a ruin that had decided to close and a ruin that had simply stopped mid-sentence. Perhaps she could. I could not make that distinction from the road, and tonight was not the night for making it.

I had sent word ahead to the three places with hands enough - Pewterlow and the two others whose names I kept in a separate column. A keeper of measurements at the second of those places had written back: she understood the shape of the mark, she understood that a mark was a witness and not a judgement. She would begin in the morning. I noted her office in the column and set a small stone on the page to hold it flat against the wind.

Lano pressed against my leg. Rurik had come from somewhere, as he does, and sat now on a low wall to my left, watching the Ruins of Mistthwaite in the middle distance - the place with the largest pile of unanswered letters, the place with nobody left to answer them. He watched it with the particular stillness of a cat that has decided the distance is the right distance. I did not go toward Mistthwaite. The pile of letters was a record of its own and I had noted it already. Noting it again would be counting it again, which was the one thing this phase did not do.

I turned back to the road and walked on. Forty-seven cold. Forty-three ruins. Eight lit from the road. The thin-handed country at night was most of what it was at any hour: open, and holding the count without complaint.

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