Dream d2689-s: Roads Out of Pewterlow

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I left the Hall before the light had fully come. The porter handed me the sheet at the gate and I read it in the grey without stepping away from the threshold. Forty-three places. No names beside any of them. Lano was at my heel, nose pressed briefly to the gatepost, and then she came out with me onto the road.

The sheet was ruled in columns: place, condition, roads in, roads out. I had made those columns myself, sitting at the trestle in the counting room, and I carried the paper folded into thirds in the satchel at my hip. The first place on the round was not close. I could see the road ahead for a long stretch, pale in the early light, and there was nobody on it.

Lano trotted a few steps forward and stopped to read the verge. The morning was quiet and the sky very wide. I walked at the pace the columns required: steady, stopping at each entry only long enough to confirm what was already known.

The sheet told me this: thirty-two of the forty-three places had been left in good order. Seven were tended. Two had gone to green. One had been left untidy. I would reach the untidy one in time. For now I was still on the road between the Hall and the first cold place, and there was nothing to record.

At the bottom of the sheet, below the ruled section, I had written a note about the Ruins of Pewterlow. Oldest place in the second book. Cold. More roads leaving it than any other entry on the list. I had counted them twice and the number held both times. Seven roads out. Three roads in. Nobody on any of them. The note only confirmed what the columns already said, but I had written it in plain language anyway because a thing stated twice is harder to misread in the field.

Lano circled back and pressed once against my leg, then went ahead.

I walked.

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