The Orchard of Quiet Things

There is no monster in the orchard.Prin Oule is sixteen years old and she has read everything anybody in this business has ever written down. Four hundred and six notebooks. Nineteen sheets off a cellar wall. Two hundred and eleven pages in a hand that got worse and then stopped.So when the spiral appears on her wrist, she is not frightened of the chambers. She knows more about what is down there than anybody who has ever gone.She is frightened of the tithe. Not of losing something - of somebody else choosing what.What she finds at the bottom is four acres of walled ground under grey light that never changes. Ninety-four fruit trees in two rings. Eleven long tables. A well with a rope on it. And about four hundred people who are perfectly, visibly happy.Nothing attacks anybody. There is bread at the fourth table and nobody minds. There is no rule on the wall, no timer, nothing in the trees - and there does not need to be.Because you can lose a person by nobody doing anything at all.Four hundred feet above her, a suspended clerk fills in a form that has been blank since the year three hundred and nine. A woman who has been alone for four hundred and eleven years is asked a question for the first time in her life. And in a kitchen on the Kessit Stair, a woman of fifty-six says a sentence every morning that she does not believe, to a lodger she does not know.The Hollow Tithe, Book Four.