Dream d3203-s: Small Coins at the Crossing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the toll bridge in Palewick at the grey end of afternoon, a wrapped parcel under my arm and a small purse of coins loose in my palm. The river ran dark and steady beneath the planks. Lano trotted ahead of me onto the bridge and stopped at the join between boards, nose down, ears up, watching the current move below. Rurik came last, pressing against the far rail, amber eyes on the relay clerk behind the booth window.

The clerk said nothing. He pointed at the parcel. I set it on the ledge and he lifted it, turned it once in both hands, pressed his thumb along the seal. His expression did not change. The wax had not been broken. The accounts inside - the first a faithful ledger of unreckoned stone, the second nine residencies dated and doubled and left to stand beside each other without either erasing the other - had traveled from their origin to this crossing without anyone opening them to improve what they said.

He set the parcel back and held out his hand. I counted the coins into it, the small kind, the kind accumulated without meaning to: three, four, five. He counted behind me with his eyes, not touching them twice. When the number was right he closed his hand and nodded once.

I picked up the parcel. Lano had moved to my heel, tail low, patient. Rurik had gone ahead already, black against the pale boards on the far side, sitting down in the middle of the walkway with his back to us, looking toward Palewick's unentered quarter. He did not move when I approached. I stepped around him.

The relay was the work. Not the reading, not the judgment - the passage itself, the seal arriving whole, the coins being the right coins in the right number. I crossed over. The clerk made a mark in his ledger. I did not see what he wrote and I did not ask.

The absent witness was waiting somewhere in the town beyond. I did not know their face. I knew only the weight of the parcel, which was the same weight it had been when I set out.

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