Dream d2822-s: Ink Without a Map

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cart track out of Quillcombe ran pale in the last light and I had walked it twice that week and knew where the ruts deepened. Lano trotted ahead, then stopped and waited. She had a small stone in her mouth, smooth and pale, and she set it down at her feet and nosed it once and left it there.

I opened the satchel on the low stone post at the track's turning. The book was near the top. I had made one entry that day and I wanted to read it back before the light went.

The entry was for a name set down in the book before the others, not in the same sitting as the sixty-four that came later, but earlier, in a different ink or a different mood - it was hard to say which - and it had waited longer than all of them. The place it named had no drawing under it. That was true of sixty-four others as well, but those had been written together in one session and this one had not. It had been waiting alone.

I read the entry back. It said what it said. A name, and now one line beneath it: the record of what had happened there inside thirty days, which was not small.

Lano had come back and sat near my boot. She watched the book. Her ears were up.

I closed it and put it in the satchel and walked on. The roofs of Quillcombe were behind. Sixty-five names still had no drawing. One of them had one entry now.

Rurik had found a post and sat high on it with his amber eyes on the road, and when I passed under him he dropped down and went ahead, black against the last of the light.

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