The boy returned to camp. He wasn’t sure if he should say anything about the strange fight he’d just witnessed. The shadow-thing hadn’t forbidden him from talking about it, but somehow it had felt private. He thought that probably he would mention it to Fleat first, and see what the owl-child thought.
But Fleat must have risen while the boy was gone. Presumably, he had decided to take a scouting flight about the landscape. He was nowhere in sight. When the boy asked Dapplegrim about it, the big horse just gave a non-committal snort.
Caewen on the other hand was still deeply asleep.
The boy decided to brew some tea. He used a pot to skim water from the stream where the water was foaming over a rock. He had enough woodland experience to know that was the best place to take water: it’s much clearer of sand, twigs and sediment than in the deep, still parts of a stream. Once he was done, he put the water on to boil over a bed of ashes that was still hot from the previous night’s fire. He had to push the ashes around with a stick to reveal the bright glow underneath, but that was easily done. All this completed, he sat for a time beside the embers, warming his toes and trying to be still and quiet. He did not want to wake Caewen.
As he sat, his mind wandered and for the first time since taking possession of the book, and he dimly remembered some of his dreams. It occurred to him that there had been something strange in them. Or stranger than usual, at least. His dreams were typically more or less ‘dream-strange’ in the ordinary sense. He’d never spoken much to other people about this sort of thing back in the village, but he gathered that his dreams were usually run of the mill; dreams of being chased by something; dreams of falling or flying; or just confusing dreams full of shifting images made perfect sense in dream-logic, but turned to nonsense on waking. But last night, his dreams had seemed to have more of a thread to them, bright and vibrant and running the whole way through. Much as if the whole mess of images were pulled together by a woven cord. Everything seemed connected. When he thought about it, there had been a voice lying behind it. His brow creased into lines as he dwelled on this. It had been a soft, old voice talking and talking. And more than that… teaching? The boy blinked his eyes at the mottle-gloomed white and gold light sifting from the canopy above. He thought to himself that perhaps he ought to write down some of the dreams. That way he could come back to them later and think about it some more.
Then the boy remembered that he had no writing things, no cut quills or wood-cutters, wax-gravers, or clay-cutters, or brushes, or any such thing. That’s a pity. Why didn’t he think to bring anything like that–
Wait a moment, thought to himself.
Write?