The Orchard Without Winter

Cairath

Chapter 32: The Orchard Without Winter

By midday they had left the ridge country behind and entered the outer orchards of Cradle Reach.

The first trees stood in disciplined rows on old terrace shelves cut broad enough for carts to turn between them. Pear, apple, quince, and plum. Torien knew some by shape and bark, others only by scent. On every branch the basin's wrongness had written itself clearly. Bud and blossom beside hard green fruit. Hard fruit beside ripeness. Ripeness beside shriveling sweetness. A single tree holding all seasons in one body and refusing to call any of them finished.

Bees moved among the branches in thick, lazy clouds.

Fallen fruit covered the ground.

None of it rotted.

What unnerved Torien first was the absence of rot. Apples split by impact where they had fallen from the branch lay on the terrace soil with their white flesh still bright. Pears gone soft enough to collapse under boot still smelled clean and honey-sweet. Plums had burst open and seeded themselves in the same place, so that tiny new shoots rose from piles of last week's or last year's or some older season's fruit with no visible distinction between them.

Nothing here accepted being over.

The orchard lanes were quiet except for insects, water, and the heavy intermittent thud of fruit dropping somewhere out of sight.

Sielle bent once to inspect an apple under a tree wall.

"This should be black with flies."

"Give it another century," Haelund said.

"I am not being metaphorical."

"Neither am I."

Torien crouched beside the fruit.

The apple's skin had split. Its seeds inside were already sprouting. One white rootlet had gone down into the soil while the rest of the flesh remained full and sweet. Beginning and ending had taken up residence in the same body and were refusing to respect one another's office.

He stood again.

"Don't eat anything from the ground," he said.

Haelund glanced over. "That sounded less like caution and more like instruction."

"It was both."

They passed under a trellis lane where grapevines had thickened over timber frames long since bowed by the load. The grapes hung black and dusty beside tiny new green clusters still forming. Beyond the lane lay a farmhouse half-swallowed by espaliered trees gone to freedom. Pear branches had thrust through the roof slates. Fig roots had cracked the chimney and descended the wall like slow lightning. Yet the house did not look abandoned in the ordinary sense.

It looked as though abandonment had never been permitted to finish.

The front door stood open.

Sielle stopped on the threshold while Torien looked in past her shoulder.

The table had been laid and left that way. Earthen bowls. Two cups. A knife. A cutting board darkened by years of use. On the board lay half a quince browned only at the edge where it had first been cut, as though the basin had granted it decay in principle but then reconsidered the speed.

Dust had gathered nowhere.

Leaves had.

Dry blossom petals and green new ones alike had drifted in through the broken roof and settled across the room in pale accumulations that made the floor look almost ceremonial.

A cradle stood by the hearth.

Not empty.

Filled with apples.

No one spoke for a moment.

Then Haelund said, very quietly, "I dislike this place with concentration."

They searched the house anyway because travelers searched structures that still stood. The cellar held jars of preserves sealed so long ago the wax should have failed. It had not. The bedchamber was veiled entirely in climbing bean runners that had rooted in the floorboards and threaded themselves through the bedframe as if the sleepers had been expected back any minute and the room had merely made itself more useful while waiting.

Behind the house, beyond a rain barrel split by vine growth, they found the graves.

Three stones in a family line beneath two old plum trees.

The leftmost had split.

Not from age. From beneath.

Earth had mounded upward against the broken marker and then cracked open in a long seam through which roots had pushed, pale and thick as wrists. One coffin board showed through the soil where the wood had been levered up and outward.

Torien went to it at once.

The coffin lid had not rotted either. It had burst.

Inside lay a woman in orchard clothes gone thin with time but not entirely dissolved. Her hair still clung in parts to the skull. Her hands were not folded. They had been drawn up and outward by the roots that threaded through the sleeves and ribcage and out between the boards like some careful and monstrous embroidery. In one hand she held three windfallen plums.

Fresh ones.

Sielle made a sound and turned away.

Aderyn did not.

"Not possession," she said softly.

"No," Torien said.

Haelund stayed six paces back with the iron bar resting across his shoulders.

"If one of you says 'worse,' I will object on principle."

Torien looked at the woman's hand.

The fingers had tightened after death around the fruit or else the basin had tightened them for her. He could not tell which possibility was more offensive.

"She was buried and then used," he said.

"Or kept," Aderyn said. "By something that believes keeping is kind."

The orchard answered them with a thud somewhere to the east.

Then another.

Not fruit.

Footsteps.

Haelund's head came up first.

"We have company."

They emerged between the rows without hurry: three figures in work clothes gray with old weather and green stain. An old man with a harvesting basket crooked over one arm. A younger woman carrying pruning hooks. A child of perhaps twelve with both hands full of dropped apples against the chest of a coat too large for him.

None of them were alive.

Not properly.

They moved with the steadiness of habit rather than the alertness of threat. Their eyes were open, but the gaze in them had gone shallow and root-distant. Soil stained the hems of their clothes. Fine feeder roots showed through the skin at the wrists and temples as pale threads under wax.

The old man bent, picked up a pear from the lane, and placed it carefully in his basket.

The younger woman went to the nearest tree and began clipping deadwood from the branch with the absorbed concentration of a task resumed midmorning after too short a pause.

The child looked at Torien.

Then at the pale script visible at his throat.

The apples in the child's arms dropped one by one into the grass.

All three dead orchard hands turned toward him together.

The vibration in his blood changed.

Not loud. Not even forceful.

Recognized.

The old man took one step toward Torien.

Then another.

The basket on his arm swung gently. Pears knocked together inside it with the soft, domestic sound of ordinary work.

"Back," Haelund said.

Torien did not move at first. The dead were not charging. They were converging in the same way the road had once listened, the way the basin now listened to every oath-shape he carried. He had the sickening sense that if he stood very still the whole orchard would eventually gather around him waiting for instruction it had long ago forgotten how to hear from any other source.

Aderyn touched his sleeve.

"This is not your office."

"It keeps becoming my office after I arrive."

"That does not make it yours."

Haelund planted the iron bar in the lane between them and the advancing dead.

"I am willing to negotiate this later. At present I recommend movement."

The younger woman with the pruning hooks had reached the grave line. She looked down at the split earth, then at the woman in the burst coffin, and began, with solemn practicality, trying to fit the lifted boards back into place.

The sight of it struck Torien harder than open violence would have.

Not malice.

Continuation.

The orchard was correcting disorder according to a mercy so warped it would never permit the dead even the dignity of ceasing.

He stepped back.

The old man stepped forward faster.

The basket tipped. Pears rolled across the lane toward Torien's boots.

Haelund swore and swung the iron bar low, not at the dead but at the terrace gate beside them. The old timber latch shattered. The gate dropped inward. He shoved Torien through, then Sielle, then Aderyn, and slammed the timber frame closed again behind them.

The dead did not strike it.

They stood on the other side among the fruit trees and waited.

The child crouched to gather the fallen apples again.

The old man righted his basket.

The younger woman resumed her clipping.

Sielle leaned against the inner stone wall breathing too fast.

"I preferred the bridge-city murderer."

"Because he at least had the courtesy to know he was one," Haelund said.

The lane they had stumbled into on the far side of the gate ran downhill between higher stone walls toward a cluster of outbuildings and a bell tower nearly hidden by blossom. Smoke rose there.

Living smoke.

Not much.

Enough.

Torien had only just seen it when a whistle snapped down from above them.

All four looked up.

A woman sat cross-legged on the top of the right-hand wall under a trained apricot branch, sling in one hand and a satchel of stones in the other. She was lean, sun-browned, and practical enough in face and dress that Torien trusted her more than beauty would have allowed. Three name-tokens hung at her throat on braided cord.

"If you intend to stand there until dark," she said, "the pickers will remember you."

Haelund looked from her to the dead orchard hands beyond the gate. "And if we do not intend that?"

"Then you come down now, say your names at the lower bell, and keep your hands out of the fruit bins."

Sielle straightened. "Who are you?"

The woman slid down from the wall with the easy confidence of someone who had done it daily for years.

"Rell," she said. "Last Keeping watch. And unless you want half the lower orchards deciding you've returned for work, you are finished exploring."

She started downhill without checking whether they followed.

After one brief glance back at the grave line and the dead still moving among the fruit trees, they did.