Dream d2722-s: Cold and in Good Order

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the highest standing wall at Pewterlow and the night was clear enough to see the whole of it.

Lano sat beside me on the broad stone cap, her nose working the dark air, ears tilted toward the valley. She did not look where I looked. She read the wind.

I took out the second book and opened it at the first page, which is as far as I have ever needed to open it up here. The second book holds forty-seven places and most of them were visible from where I stood if I knew what to look for, which I do. You learn the shapes. A collapsed lintel reads different from a standing arch at three hundred yards. You learn to tell a heaped wall from a sound one, a tended place from one that nobody has been near.

Thirty-five of them in good order. I could see most of those from the wall: rooflines intact where there were rooflines, thresholds clear, the ground in front of each one not encroached. Good order does not mean inhabited. It means what it says.

Seven tended. That is the better word when someone has been. Not better in quality, only more precise. A tended place has had a hand on it recently - a cleared drain, a stacked stone, a path beaten down by return. Seven of those. I have met the people who tend them, mostly, and none of them are in the second book by name. You record the place, not the person.

Two gone to green. I can see one of them from here, or I can see where it was: a low mound now, a soft outline, nothing standing. The second I cannot see from the wall. I know where it is in the book.

One left untidy. I looked at it a long time. Nothing dangerous, nothing lost. Untidy is the word I used and it is the right word.

Rurik came up the steep inner face of the wall without a sound and took the warm place against my ankle and stared out. His tail moved once. He could see more than I could in the dark, or differently, and he gave none of it away.

Thirty-five of the forty-seven places have one road out or none. I counted the roads from the wall as well, which is not the same as walking them, but useful. The roads that leave Pewterlow are the most of any place in the second book, and every one of them was empty as far as I could see, which is far, because the night was clear and the roads are pale.

I wrote the count in the second book under the date and closed it. Lano pressed her flank against my leg without turning from whatever she was reading in the air. Queda, she said, which may have been a sound she was making or may have been a word.

I stood on the wall a while longer. The ruins held their shapes in the dark. Pewterlow is the oldest place in the second book and it was cold in the way that old things are cold: not abandoned, not forgotten, simply no longer kept. I wrote that down too, in the margin, because it seemed like the kind of thing the margin was for.

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