Dream d2981-s: What the Sheet Said

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Keeper read the distant account aloud as we walked the last mile into Alderbarrow, and her voice carried in the cold air of first light. The sheet said: a working mill, two roads meeting, a well in the yard of the Counting House, seventeen cold buildings and six in use, no fire in the grange since the third winter. The sheet was confident. It had been written by someone standing on a road much like this one, looking down a slope at rooftops, and it was detailed in the way that distance permits detail, which is to say it named everything and had touched nothing.

Lano trotted ahead on the rutted surface, her nose low, reading the road in her own way.

The Counting House was where the sheet placed it. The well was present. But the well had a fitted cover, boards and a lock, and that was not in the sheet. The Keeper noted the cover. The Keeper noted the lock. Neither of us offered a reason for it, because the sheet had offered none and this was not the place for reasons. The sheet said open and the well was closed and both statements went into the record.

The grange had a fire. Not a large fire - a thin line of smoke above the chimney, the colour of the morning itself - but a fire, against the sheet's three-winter absence. The Keeper stopped reading and wrote instead. I watched her hand move across the new page. Lano sat down on the road and watched the grange. Rurik stepped off the road entirely, slipped through a gap in the low wall, and sat in the grange yard facing the chimney, amber eyes open.

The sheet had called Alderbarrow seventeen cold and six working. We would count as we went; we had not counted yet. What we had was the well covered, the fire burning, and the Keeper's new page open beside the old sheet. The road ran level into the town square, which was smaller than the sheet implied but present, and we walked into it as the first light came fully over the eastern rooflines.

Alderbarrow held still. It did not confirm the sheet and it did not refuse it. It simply was, at first light, on the morning the sheet met the door.

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