The Folds owe their life to the Lee Wall, a long ridge running north to south along their western, Windscar side, which is no built wall at all. It takes the dry wind on its far face, and in its shadow the air is still enough for blossom to set and soil to stay where it is put. Climb it from the windward side and the wind leans on you the whole way up; come over the crest and it is suddenly a sound behind you rather than a weight. The wind shadow is only the start. Slope shape, retaining walls, stored water, the memory each fold keeps of its own soil, and long familiarity with its own limits all matter, and a fold that forgot any one of them would find out within a few years that the ridge alone does not feed anyone.

Inside the folds there are no rivers worth the name; the short ones that do run go north out of the terrace country to the Tidelace estuaries. Water comes from springs, from runoff off the ridges, and from seasonal streams that run in the wet months and are stony beds the rest of the year. It moves by channel and by release, from cistern to terrace, and never carries a boat. A fold’s whole life can be read in its water-works: the catch channels slanting across the slopes above the orchards, the cistern at the head, the little sluices at each terrace that open in turn, and the drains below that carry what is left down to the next wall.

The Folds are never far from the dry country around them, and most of their dangers are the slow kind. One is not.

That last item is the one a stranger finds hardest to take seriously, and the one that explains most of what a stranger sees. Halflings are not afraid of the dry; they have lived beside it for as long as there have been folds. They fear raiders, and bar the door against them. They fear more the good year that teaches a fold to spend, because a fold that has spent its reserve has nothing left to bar the door with. A fold raided once reads out the raid’s dead with every autumn count for a thousand years.

On the outer margins lie the Dry Folds, valleys whose terraces have gone to scrub and whose cisterns stand cracked and empty. From a saddle they look like any other fold until the eye finds the colour wrong: grey-green thorn where the orchards should be, walls slumped into the slope, a cistern mouth open to the sky like a dry well. They are remembered as the country of the Dryfold Halflings, an older lifeway that did not survive there. Why the Dry Folds failed is argued in every generation, at every commons, and no argument has ever settled it. Most Halflings take them as the plainest warning in the region of what happens when a fold spends past its keeping.

Nobody lives in them, and they are not empty. The Dryfold folk are said to have sealed their store-rooms against a year that never came, and treasure-diggers break into the cracked cisterns after the jars of oil and dried fruit that are said to wait there still. Outlaws winter in the empty houses. Fold children dare each other to go over the saddle and bring back a jar of Dryfold wine, or to sleep a night in a Dryfold hearth-room, and come back with tales of hearths that are still warm and of a dry cistern that echoes footsteps nobody is making. Most who go find thorn, empty terraces, and scorpions. One boy in a generation does not come back at all.

A fold town is a close cluster of stone houses along the upper edge of the terraces, kept off the good ground, with store-rooms on the cool side of each house. The houses lean into one another for shelter and share walls where they can; their roofs are low, their doors face down the fold, and from any doorstep a household can see its own terraces. Nothing is built on soil that could grow something. A stranger notices the fallow terraces before anything else: whole steps of good ground lying idle in plain sight of hungry people, and nobody allowed to plant them.

Every household keeps its own stores and owes a share to the common reserve held at the fold’s cistern hall, and everyone knows roughly what both amount to. Counting is household work before it is anything else. Children learn to tally the shelves, to tell which terraces rest this year, and to say how many days of water the cistern holds. A Halfling child is named at the first autumn count after its birth, comes of age when a share of the stores is set in its name, and marries by moving a share, each step said aloud at the count (the counted life is told in The Folds, the Scarps, and the Shore (FND)). Every fold lullaby begins count the jars and bar the door, and few children know that the next line is about the raiders.

Most work is maintenance. Walls are mended after every heavy rain, stone by stone, by the household whose terrace they hold and by the terrace ward that keeps the whole slope and mans it when the horn blows. Cistern circles release water to the terraces in turn and clear the channels before the wet season. Orchard work moves through the year from pruning to picking to drying and pressing, and orchard leagues share labour, presses, and drying floors across neighbouring folds, so that in picking season whole households walk over the saddle to work another fold’s trees and expect the same back. A share of every fold’s terraces lies fallow at any time, and a household that tries to plant its fallow share hears about it at the next commons.

People eat fruit fresh and dried, grain, preserved and pressed stores, and garden food. A good table in the Folds is generous without being lavish: enough that a guest is never stinted, never so much that anyone at it could mistake the meal for a boast. The smell of a fold in late summer is fruit on the drying floors, warm stone, and the faint sourness of the presses; in winter it is woodsmoke and the cold, dusty sweetness of a store-room opened for the day’s measure.

The year turns on two moments. In spring the planting rites open the terraces, and the cistern hall’s first reading of the year says how much the terraces may draw. Summer is weeding, watering by turn, and watching the cistern fall; in a dry run there are watchers on every saddle, and a horn from the rim sends the children to the cistern hall and the young to the walls. In autumn the harvest is brought in, the reserve is counted aloud at the cistern hall before the elders of the measure orders, and only what lies beyond it goes to market. Any household may challenge a figure. The tally is then recounted on the spot, and a challenger whose recount holds the hall’s figure owes a day’s labour on the walls, which keeps challenges honest without making them rare. After the count and before planting, each fold meets as a commons: terrace wards report on the walls, cistern circles on the water, and the fold decides which terraces rest. Winter is lived on stores, walls, and the arguments the count produced.

Hospitality is real but has edges. A traveller at a household door is fed, without question and without being asked to pay. A party at the edge of a fold is a different matter, received at the fold market or the cistern hall according to what the fold has said aloud it can spare. Windscar escorts camp at the terrace-edge grounds outside the fold, trade at the market, rest, and water by counted measure, and then go on. Gnome traders on the coastward side are received the same way, their arrival called and their loads counted. Being received is not being let in, and both peoples have long since learned the difference. An escort could force a fold’s terraces in an afternoon. It does not, because a fold raided once is never generous again, and the next dry year the escort would be the one waiting at a shut cistern.

The cistern halls are built for that difference. Each stands at its fold head, where the road comes in along the bare saddles between folds, and receives its guests in a yard outside the terraces, so that a party can be answered, watered, and sent on without setting foot on the good ground. A stranger can spend a season in the Folds and never walk a terrace. Those who try uninvited, thieves and raiders alike, meet the fold’s young on the walls. Larger powers call that narrowness, or suspicion. To a Halfling it is simply what a fold is: abundance is a discipline rather than a spree, and a door is only generous if it can also be closed.

The Folds have no capital, and if they have a centre it is the great cistern halls of the inner folds, where the measure orders carry most weight. The largest of those halls stands at Evenlee, an inner fold town of two or three thousand Halflings in a deep hollow with a spring at its head, its stone houses packed along the upper edge of the terraces and the measure orders' tally houses ringing the hall. Its outer yard has been stormed and held more often than any other in the Folds. Each autumn the reserve is counted aloud there before the whole commons, and other folds wait to hear the count.

Plumbfold, on the windward side, owns the Measure Cistern, where the Lee Road comes in over the saddle. A few hundred Halflings live there with the escorts' camping ground in plain view, and the hall that receives Orc parties also keeps their own reserve. No fold argues more often about what it can spare, and none has been besieged more often. Spurfold, an outer fold on a spur beside the Lee Road, is home to Edgefold and Outfold households who live closest to outside traffic. Its market takes its turn on the Market Round, and in good years it does well from escorts and coastal goods passing through. In bad years the same traffic arrives asking for water, and now and then it stops asking and starts raiding.

Dewcup is the smallest kind of fold: a hollow with a spring at its head and terraces stepped from floor to rim, half a dozen households, an orchard on the warm slope, and a cistern cut into the rock. It shares presses and drying floors with its neighbours through an orchard league, and keeps its fallow share as strictly as any great fold. Its spring is small enough that a single bad summer could end it, and the raiding bands know where it is.

About 240,000 Halflings live in the Folds, and they are nearly everyone there. Most are Foldward. The Leeward folk of the inner folds and the Edgefold and Outfold households along the roads are smaller shares. Orc escorts at the terrace-edge grounds and Gnome traders at the Counted Lee are received, counted, and gone again, and none of them lives in a fold.

Fold dress is home-woven wool and felt from the Windscar trade: smocks and aprons for terrace and orchard work, short coats in winter, and bare feet in the warm months. Most adults carry a household tally on a cord at the belt, and a stranger soon learns to watch it the way one watches a purse elsewhere; most carry a sling beside it. Edgefold Halflings are browner and leaner than the folk of the inner folds. Stores carry a fold through most bad years, so only about one child in five dies young, mostly of winter coughs. Adults commonly pass seventy, a hundred is old, and a newborn can expect about sixty years. Most die of age and winter illness, some of slips and falling terraces, some on the walls, and in a long dry run, like the present one, of hunger.

The household name a child takes at its first autumn count is the name its share stands under in the store tally, and the fold’s name follows it outside the fold; Edgefold households often add a road byname. Read out at an autumn count: Merrin Coddry, Bendel Tullam, Odella Wenning, Pimsy Orrel, Hesper Coddry. Whoever comes to a door is asked, before anything else, how long they mean to stay.

Under the Commons, three Halfling lifeways share the region. Foldward Halflings are most of it. Leeward folk, of the measure-heavy inner folds, are the ones outsiders meet across a tally bench, and the ones outsiders describe when they describe Halflings at all. Edgefold or Outfold households hold the outer valleys along the roads and live closest to outside traffic, its profits and its raiders; they remember the roadfold Halflings, whose measure did not outlast the road, and argue among themselves how much trade a fold can take in before it stops being a fold.

The order is fought over from inside, and always along the same line. Prestige-minded households and receiving elders hold that a fold too narrow in good years will lose trust and influence, and that reserve can harden into fear. Reserve-minded custodians answer that abundance is exactly when a people becomes dangerous to itself. Each side suspects the other: generosity that is really display, or caution that is really hoarding in clean language. Neither suspicion is ever wholly wrong, which is why the quarrel has outlived every bargain that tried to end it.

In the present dry run a third quarrel sits on top of the old one: whether this is the run the long-cycle reserve was kept for. Open it too early and the fold has spent its last defence on a bad year rather than a ruinous one; open it too late and there may be no terraces left to save. Every cistern hall in the Folds is asking the question this year, and every one of them is asking it in front of its own households, with watchers on the saddles and the struck bands somewhere beyond them.

There is no Halfling church in the Folds and no clergy. Belief is household and commons custom, the alignment custom of bounded plenty, with one god at its centre. Tamsel the Season-Weaver, a Resonant of Aion born of the folds' long dependence on the balance of the harvest, keeps the turning year: spring planting rites, the thanks of autumn storing, and the Festival of the Turn, which is said to bring a good harvest if it is kept with true joy. Fold households picture Tamsel as the season wears them: a green, rain-smelling youth in spring, sun-browned and gold in summer, old and crimson and smelling of woodsmoke and stored fruit in autumn, pale and still as frost in winter.

Children are told the tale of the Long Summer, when Tamsel held the summer for a year, with endless warmth and plenty, and the winter after it emptied a fold to its last measure. It is the reason given for never spending the reserve on plenty, and the reason a Halfling grows uneasy at a season that will not end. Tamsel’s strength rises and falls with the health of the folds, and in the present dry run the god faces the same choice as the cistern halls. A season forced too hard runs up a seasonal debt that the cycle must repay, a late frost on early blossom, ground tired for years after a rushed harvest, and a debt like that could ruin a fold for generations. A season left alone means watching the folds spend what they were taught to keep. Some households pray for rain and growth, and some would rather Tamsel force the season than see any reserve opened.

Other gods keep company at the edges. At the Counted Lee, Gnome clerks still murmur the name of Quennet the Clockmaker. Windscar escorts camped at the terrace-edge grounds keep their own gods at their fires: Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden, who keeps the names of those who held passage, and Rakhal the Storm-Caller, whose followers are quickest to call a fold’s narrowing stale.

The cistern lies at the head of its fold, against the foot of the Lee Wall: a long basin cut back into the rock, roofed over most of its length against the dry wind and fed by a spring at the fold head and by catch channels off the ridge. Down its inner wall run the Reading Steps, a flight of narrow steps cut one measure apart, by which the water’s depth is read. A reading is called out from the steps and repeated in the hall below, never written up first. Children dare each other to touch the lowest step, which has not been dry in living memory, and the fold tells them that the year it shows is the year the Dry Folds died.

The hall sits just beneath the cistern’s mouth on a broad walled terrace: a long stone hall, store-rooms cut into the slope behind it, and a receiving yard in front, where the cistern’s outflow channel feeds a stone trough before running on to the terraces. The trough is where guests drink. Below the hall the fold opens out into terraced orchard and garden, and a guest is not taken down there. The Lee Road reaches the yard along a bare saddle above the terraces, so a party can be brought in without setting foot on the good ground, as the Folds build every cistern hall. Beside the road, outside the yard wall, lies the camping ground where escorts wait out a day that is not theirs, among stones that hide scorpions; every escort shakes out its boots at dawn. A party standing in the yard can see the hall, the trough, and the roofline of the cistern above. It cannot see the water. What the cistern holds reaches it as a number.

Further out, the Lee Road is open and dangerous country. Raiders out of the dry lands strike at parties on the saddles, where there is no cover and no water, and in a swarm year locusts come over the Lee Wall in a brown cloud. From the highest bend of the saddle a traveller can see the nearest of the Dry Folds, a valley of thorn and cracked cistern walls whose store-rooms, the fold says, were sealed in the last year anyone kept them and never opened again.

The cistern belongs to Plumbfold, the fold at whose head it stands. Its cistern circle keeps and releases the water, its households owe their share of the common reserve to the store-rooms behind the hall, and its commons decide what leaves the fold, which in practice means the oldest and best-stocked households do. Around them work the measure orders, which carry more weight here than anywhere: terrace elders who stand at the Reading Steps, orchard tally houses from the neighbouring folds, and reserve-report circles that check the hall’s figures against their own. The receiving elders give the fold’s answer to whoever has arrived: exchange, rest, shelter for a time, delay, redirection, or nothing yet.

The users come mainly by the Lee Road. Windscar escorts bring parties up from the defended wells of the Rimward Basins and down from the passes of the High Scars: traders with salt, hides, and felt, herders with animals to sell, and travellers who need water more than trade. Halflings from the outer valleys come to the yard too, to buy, to sell, or to argue a count, and once a year every fold within reach sends someone to hear the autumn reading. A few herders of the outer valleys hire out as saddle guides, who know which seeps still run in a dry year and which bends the raiders favour, and who are paid by whichever side asks first. In dry years the fold hires sellswords out of the Rimward Basins to ride the saddle, and watches them almost as closely as the raiders they are paid to chase.

The hall’s year follows the fold’s. In spring the circle opens the terraces by turn, and the first reading of the year says how much they may draw. Through summer the level falls and the readings are taken more often. In autumn, after the harvest, the reserve is counted aloud: the circle reads the steps, the store-rooms are tallied shelf by shelf, and the reports of the neighbouring circles are set against both. When the Market Round brings the fold its turn, the yard fills with stalls for a few days, and the escort traffic, and the raiding on the saddle, peak with it.

On an ordinary day the work is small and public. A reading in the morning, called down and repeated. Water released to the terraces by turn. An escorted party arriving on its market day is met in the yard; a receiving elder hears its captain and names what the fold can spare, and the party drinks from the trough by counted measure, in front of both sides. A party that misses its day pitches outside the yard wall and waits, counting what the wait will cost it at the far end of the road.

The yard has its own legend. In the summer of the Crisis, the tale goes, a receiving elder walked out alone through the escort camp with a single water-skin, drank from it in front of the war-captain, and gave him the rest, and nobody drew a blade that night. Escorts and fold alike still say the guest drinks first, the count comes after when a party reaches the trough, and Halfling mothers sing their children to sleep with a counting rhyme for the Reading Steps that ends on the step that is never dry.

The cistern was already an old and respected receiving ground while the Founding of the Foldward Commons was binding the folds together, and in the long ages since, its basin has been recut and relined so often that nothing of the first work can be told. Three quarrels made it what it is now, and its yard is laid out to remember each of them.

The hall argues from all three today without ever adding a fourth.

This year the readings have been falling for longer than anyone likes. The hall still gives water to every party it accepts; it gives stores less often, and says so aloud, as it swore after the Crisis. Hungry escorts camped outside a fold wall have broken in before, and the fold’s young keep a night watch on the terraces with slings and dogs. Behind the hall the question of the whole region, whether this is the run the long-cycle reserve was kept for, is sharpest here, because the hall answers its own terraces and the Lee Road from the same yard. If it opens the reserve, the water it has told the escorts it cannot spare will be running into orchards in plain view of the camping ground. If it keeps the reserve closed, its own households will watch strangers drink at the trough while their terraces wait for a release. Old sealed jars from the Dry Fold have begun to sell at the camping ground, two who ate from one lie sick in the hall, and a band has been striking parties on the saddle road, Orc and Halfling alike. Whatever the hall decides, the Windscar will hear of it within the season.

The Lee sits in the shelter of a headland, where a short shelf of level ground lies between the foot of the terrace country and a stretch of quiet water off the outer roads. The coast road comes down off the last terraces in a long zigzag and ends at the staging yard: a walled, open yard where loads are set down in rows by burden class and wait. Below it the transfer pier runs out into the lee water, long enough for Gnome coastal craft to lie alongside at most states of the tide. The pier has its own enemies. Shipworms hollow its piles from inside, so that every few years a stretch gives way under a laden cart, and congers live in the rubble below and take the fingers of any hand that trails in the water.

The tally hall stands between yard and pier, a plain stone hall with two doors, one facing up the road and one facing the water. Inside, Halfling counters and Gnome clerks sit at the same benches and keep the Long Tally, the joint count of the Lee, in which every declared window, every change to it, and every load that waited too long is written twice, once in fold count and once in harbour reading, side by side. Above the headland a signal post answers the coast’s beacon lines, so that a window declared or moved along the Lacework reaches the hall before any craft does. Nothing else stands there: no breakwater, no market, no village. No one lives at the Lee but the hall’s keepers and a few hired spears who watch the yard at night, for a yard full of the folds' best stores draws thieves down off the terraces, and the zigzag has dark bends where a carrier’s mule can be cut loose and gone before the shout carries.

Under the headland the rocks run out in a ragged spur that the tide covers twice a day, and every craft that has ignored a moved window has gone onto it. What they carried lies in the kelp below: casks of lamp oil, crates of harbour brass, and, the carriers say, a Gnome strongbox with a gauge-house seal that three generations of fold children have dived for at low water and none has raised. Beyond the spur is a small cove that the Long Tally does not mention, with a beach and a path up the cliff.

The Lee is shared rather than held, and each half answers for its own side of a handoff. The sharing is not even: the harbours own the craft and the water, and a fold with a load spoiling in the yard has less to bargain with than a clerk who can sail away. On the fold side, counters and elders of the folds that send their goods down the coast road keep the yard and the Halfling bench; they say how much each load is and the day after which waiting spoils it or costs a fold its reserve. On the harbour side, clerks from the nearest Gaugeward harbour keep the pier, the signal post, and the Gnome bench; they declare approach windows and move them when tide, fog, or weather will not hold the earlier ones, as harbour custom lets them. Between them stands the custom the Timing Feud won: any change that comes after a load has passed its day must be named in the hall with both benches sitting, and the loss written in the Long Tally before anyone shouts over who bears it.

The users are carriers coming down the coast road with dried fruit, grain, and preserved stores; Gnome coastal craft putting in with fish, cordage, lamp oil, worked metal, and instruments from the gauge houses; and the harbour hands who load them, among them some coastal Humans who work Gnome quays and crews. In the busy weeks the folds hire escorts for the road, and the spears who walk carriers down the zigzag are often the same Humans who loaded a craft the week before. The hall pays its yard spears by the season, and when a road band grows bold it posts a price, which brings bounty-takers down from the folds and sellswords off the harbour quays. Both benches hire them; neither trusts the ones the other hired. Fold goods go no further than the pier, and harbour goods no further than the yard.

The Lee’s year is pinched between two calendars. The folds release nothing until the autumn count has set aside the reserve, so the bulk of the year’s surplus comes down the road late. The coast’s calm months end in the storm season, when windows shorten, the outer roads close first, and some harbours shut their mouths until spring. Most of the Lee’s business is crowded into the weeks between the count and the gales, and in those weeks the yard is full, the road is busy, and the thieves are busiest of all. Every fold knows that a load picked too early may wait and spoil, and a load picked too late may find no window left.

An ordinary day starts with the morning signal. A clerk writes up the windows the beacon line has passed down, the counters match them against the loads in the yard, and the carriers on the road learn by noon whether to hurry or wait. When a craft comes alongside on its window, loads go out of the yard in the order the hall has set, and each one is struck off both columns of the Long Tally as it crosses the pier. When a window moves, both benches sit. Most changes pass without a quarrel, because fog in the outer roads is plain to everyone. Fewer pass quietly when the sky over the headland is clear, and a hall that has seen knives drawn across its benches keeps its spears close on those days. When the Long Grey lies on the water, no craft comes, and the hall keeps a lamp in the seaward door. Pilots say that a hail out of the fog off the Lee is not to be answered unless the boat’s name is one the hall is expecting.

The road has its own tales, told in fold kitchens to carriers' children. The best loved is of the carrier who walked the zigzag alone on a moonless night with her fold’s whole seed-grain on two mules, while a band held the dark bends above, and who sang the counting song so loudly the whole way down that the thieves took her for a column of spears and let her pass. Carriers still sing it on the bends, and say count it twice or count it gone as they load. A fold sends its loads down tied with a count-cord, a knotted tally charmed to remember its knots, so that a load cut open on the road and retied cannot pass the hall as whole; thieves who know this cut the cord and take everything.

The Lee grew out of the Leeward-Tidelace Measures, the custom that made fold count and harbour declaration two halves of one exchange. Its hall and pier have been rebuilt more times than anyone has counted. The place and the custom have lasted. The custom took its present shape in the Counted Lee Timing Feud. Fold elders charged that the harbours moved their windows to push the loss onto the folds; harbour masters answered that some folds wanted a difficult coast to keep inland time. Loads rotted on the pier, the folds went into hungry winters, and they won what they won only by threatening to take their grain to other landings. No blood was shed, which is why the feud is the quietest of the far side’s great quarrels and why it still rankles. The end was a bargain: the harbours kept the power to move a window, and a late change had at least to be named as lost time. The Leeward-Tidelace Timing Oath swore the whole edge to it: name the change, write down the loss, then bargain over who caused it. The benches at the Lee still recite the oath, and the folds still bear most of the loss it names.

Two gods keep company at the Lee without much liking each other. Gnome clerks murmur the name of Quennet the Clockmaker when a window has to be moved, half in thanks and half in apology to whoever will bear the lost time, and Halfling carriers keep the year of Tamsel. Their worshippers first quarrelled here over who had wasted whose time, and the quarrel has never quite stopped. The oath is also the main reason Quennet is fading on the coast: a harbour that can name who bears a lost moment has less need to pray for one.

This year the folds are in a dry run. Less comes down the road, every count is argued harder before anything leaves the terraces, and harbours that count on fold grain have begun to ask why their windows go half filled. Hungry years bring more thieves to the road, and this one has. For the first time in a long while it is the folds, not the coast, whose timing everyone is cursing.