The plant is a tuft of narrow grass-like leaves a hand high, rising from a corm the size of a chestnut. In autumn, after the first rain, each corm sends up one to three cups of pale violet petals veined in darker purple, and from the centre hang three long, bright red-orange threads beside the yellow pollen-tips. A bed in flower is a low purple haze along the terrace for a week or two. The fresh flowers smell faintly of honey and hay; the dried threads have a strong, bitter-sweet scent that fills a store-room.

It wants sun, shelter, and dry, well-drained ground, and it is grown on the warm south-facing terraces of the inner folds in small beds, each kept by one household. It is not grown elsewhere on the far side that the Folds know of.

It does not set seed. A corm flowers in autumn, grows its leaves through the winter, and in spring makes small daughter corms beside itself and withers. Every few years the beds are lifted in summer, the corms split and counted, and the best replanted; a bed left too long thins and stops flowering.

The flowers are picked at dawn on the day they open, and the threads drawn out by hand and dried over a low fire the same day. It takes a whole terrace bed to fill a small pot. Fold households use a pinch for feast bread and preserves and for the yellow of festival cloth, and the rest goes to market at the autumn count, when only what lies beyond the reserve is sold. Gnome traders carry it to the coast. Its only danger is to a household’s name: a family that sells more than its share, or cuts its saffron with dyed thread, hears about it at the next commons.

Picking is shared work, and children are taught to draw the threads before they are trusted with a knife. Halflings say saffron is a crop that cannot be hurried, and use it as a byword for patience and for counting small: "a saffron count" is an exact one. A household’s saffron beds pass down with its terraces, and the corms are counted among the stores in the cistern hall’s reckoning like grain.

Saffron is worth more than silver by weight on the coast, and the Folds' saffron terraces are the first place a thief or a raiding band goes; folds that grow it keep dogs on the terraces at picking time.