The Turning House

Overview

The Turning House is an abandoned water mill on a side river of the Confluence Basins, a morning's walk above a march-town ford. For a generation it ground on an off-key working, and its wheel has turned without water ever since. It is one of the few off-key places known on Caeldon, where the Dissonance lies close under the true world.

The Place

The mill stands where it always stood: a stone house of two storeys on the bank, a timber wheel on its river side, and a race cut from the river above. The race has been dry since the river took a new bed a few hundred paces off, and the wheel turns anyway, slowly, with the sound of water that is not there. The millstones can be heard grinding from the lane.

Inside, every door opens on the same room: the grinding floor, with its stones turning and its hopper full of grain that is never used up. Go out by the back door and the grinding floor is there again; climb the stair and come down it, and it is there again. Those who have gone in and come out say the way out is the door you did not mean to take, and that the floor is a little lower each time. A meal-dust lies on everything, grey and fine, and smells of nothing.

Keepers and Users

The mill lies in a lordship like everything in the Basins, and the lord's roll still counts it. No lord has taken its rent for longer than the roll can say. The village below it keeps it in the only way that works, and treasure-diggers keep coming because the tales say the last miller hid the lord's share in the mill and never paid it over.

The village's eldest household keeps the threshold. It descends from the miller's sister, who walked out of the mill in the last winter it ground for the lord and would never say what she saw.

The Medieval Present

Every year at the Festival of the First Sheaf, once the first stalk has been cut for Anvelle, the eldest of that household lays a sheaf of the first cutting on the mill threshold and the village sings the reaping song through, once, slowly, as their grandmothers taught it. In a year the song is sung true the wheel slows for a season and the grinding grows faint. In a year it is not, the village hears it from its beds.

Nobody ploughs the field beside the mill, and nobody grazes it. Grain carried past the threshold is thrown in the river, and a child who brings home a handful of the grey meal-dust is washed in running water before it may come indoors. The village's grieving and sleepless are the ones who wander up the lane at night, and the household keeps a watch on it after every death.

History

The mill was built and worked like any other until a miller under a lord's levy set an off-key working on the wheel to grind more than the grain he was given. The tales say he had it from a book he should not have opened. For a generation the mill met every levy the lord set and made the miller's family rich, and every year the village beside it grew poorer and quieter, until the winter the miller and his household went in and did not come out. The tales put it in the hardening of the lordships, in the Settlement.

Tensions

• The lord's share. A new lord has found the mill on his roll with a generation of unpaid levy written against it, and means to have it, and has hired diggers who say they can find the miller's hoard by daylight.
• The new ploughland. Grain levies are rising, and the reeve wants the field beside the mill broken for a second harvest.
• A voice on the grinding floor. A digger who came out of the mill last spring swears he heard a child singing the reaping song inside, wrong in the middle verse, as nobody in the village sings it.