The Quiet Orchard

Overview

The Quiet Orchard is a dead hamlet in a small fold on the outer edge of the Leeward Folds, emptied in a single winter. Its houses stand, its terraces are walled, and its orchard still bears, never in the right season. It is one of the few off-key places known on Caeldon, where the Dissonance lies close under the true world.

The Place

The fold is a narrow hollow with a spring at its head, smaller than most, and better kept than any fold should be that nobody keeps. Its retaining walls have not slipped. Its cistern holds water in years when every cistern around it is low. A row of stone houses runs along the upper edge of the terraces, doors shut, store-rooms full.

The orchard covers the warm slope below the houses, and it is wrong. It blossoms in autumn and sets fruit in midwinter, and the fruit is heavy and sweet and goes black within a day of picking. No birds take it and no hornets nest in it. Late frost, which takes every other fold's blossom, never touches it. Walking up the terraces, travellers feel the place before they see anything amiss: a weight in the chest, then the quiet. No sound carries in the orchard, not a footstep, not a shout, and a dropped pail lands without a noise.

Keepers and Users

No household has taken the fold up again, and the commons have never let one try. The hall of the nearest fold keeps it, by custom and by count: its terrace wards walk the saddle above the dead fold in every dry run, and turn back anyone going down. Outlaws hide there sometimes, as in the Dry Folds, and the wards say the outlaws are welcome to it. Treasure-diggers come for the full store-rooms, and those who come out bring nothing they will eat.

The Medieval Present

Every autumn, after its own reserve is counted, the nearest hall counts the dead hamlet aloud: every household by name, and then the walkers it shut out, by number, because their names were never learned. A child of the hall carries a lamp to the saddle and back while the count is said. In a year the count is said through without a stumble, the orchard goes quiet in the right sense and drops its wrong-season fruit unripe. The hall pays for the lamp oil from its own reserve and does not argue about it.

A hamlet near the orchard is said to be growing quieter, and that is told at the Dissonance.

History

The fold fell in a dry run of the Unrecorded Age. A party of walkers came over the saddle in midwinter, out of a fold that had failed, and asked at the yard gate for water. The hamlet's hall said it could spare none, shut the gate, and struck them from its count; they died on the saddle. Before the spring, the hamlet was dead too. The other folds tell it as the plainest lesson they have that a fold can narrow falsely, and every lullaby that begins count the jars and bar the door has a verse, sung only in that hollow's neighbours, about the door that should have stayed open.

Tensions

• The full cistern. The dry run has the neighbouring folds counting days of water, and the dead fold's cistern is full.
• The walkers' names. A Windscar escort has brought a recitation from its own treaty-ground that claims to name the walkers who died on the saddle.
• The store-rooms. A merchant from the coast has offered the hall a year's grain for the right to empty the store-rooms.