Dream d2673-s: The Record Finds Its Keeper

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I heard them before I saw them - two voices under the eaves of the courtyard, the rain running in thin lines off the edge of the overhang and catching the lamplight from inside. Lano was ahead of me, her white shape pale against the wet stones, and she had stopped. Her ears were up. She did not go forward.

The Keeper of the Eastern Ledger and the Clerk of Pewterlow were standing close together, not arguing loudly - arguing quietly, the kind that costs more. I stood in the gap between the outer gate and the courtyard and waited.

They were not disagreeing about numbers. That part, I understood quickly, was finished. The Clerk had the older count; the Keeper had the newer. Both were right about different moments. That argument had already closed.

What was open now was something else.

The Clerk said: the people who stood in these places put down what they saw. If the record belongs to the Hall, it belongs to no place. A place that can be corrected from outside is a place that has already been taken.

The Keeper said nothing for a moment. The rain came down. Lano pressed against my leg, warm through my wet coat.

Then the Keeper said: the record is accurate or it is not. That is all a record can be or fail to be.

The Clerk said: you are still asking the first question. I am asking the second one.

I came through the gate then, because I had to pass through the courtyard to reach the Hall floor, and they both turned. Lano went wide around them, nose down on the wet cobblestones, and I noted that she did not go close to either of them. I did not know what that meant. I only noted it.

Inside, the count was already laid out - 65 places, the marks set in columns. Three with their own keeping. Thirty-five with only a few. Twenty-seven with no one. The Ruins of Pewterlow at the top of one column, the most hands gathered there of any place on the list. The Ruins of Mistthwaite with its pile of unanswered letters, unanswered because there was no one left to answer them.

I set my copy beside the others.

The argument from the courtyard had not followed us in. But it had changed something in the room anyway - I could feel it in the way the Keeper stood at one edge of the table and the Clerk at the other, both looking at the same marks, neither speaking.

The record had been right. The record had been accurate. No one was contesting that now.

What was being contested was whether accuracy was enough to make something yours.

I did not know how to mark that in any column. I wrote the night's date at the top of my sheet, the place name, the count of hands, and left the rest of the page empty, because nothing else that had happened was mine to record.

Rurik came in last. He walked the full length of the table without pausing, jumped to the far windowsill, and sat with his back to the room. His tail moved once and went still.

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