Settled foreign powers keep a clerk whose whole duty is knowing where Baratalda is this year. The Villtur clans, travellers themselves, follow the fair without blinking and hold it to be the one sensible government on Talan.
Travellers agree on the border of Baratalda even where the maps argue, because the border is in the air: apple blossom, orange, the cherry-sweetness that sticks to the back of the throat, changing valley by valley with whatever is ripe. Every fruit known on Talan grows somewhere in Baratalda, and a small famous handful grows nowhere else at all; and since everything that carries sugar can be fermented, the drink runs wider still than the fruit. Wine, cider, perry, brandy, cordial, vinegar, preserve: the chroniclers' line is that never in one country were there so many variations of taste, and the Baratalda table proves it three times a day. The scent is in the bread, the meat glaze, the winter cordial, the soap. A Baratalda native abroad is caught out by plain water.
Every sibling of Baratalda masters time by enduring it: Lurrath holds, Greenward heals, Sugeiturri keeps the current flowing. Baratalda masters time by reading it. The country is a thousand clocks running at a thousand speeds, and the whole art of the place is knowing, for each living thing, the right moment to act.
One perfect week a year. The Call goes out at first light, the horns sound, and a town that moved like honey yesterday brings in a whole crop in three frantic days.
The middle clocks: the press, the rack, the cellar. Every household lays something down, and a family's cellar is its memory.
The long clocks: graft-lines that bear for grandchildren, barrels laid down for a reign. The depth of these is what the Housen count for rule.
A year of patience here detonates, then goes back to waiting.
The three days are the whole reason Baratalda is one country. Fruit rots where grain forgives, and no valley's own hands can meet its own window, so the harvest rides on the crews: professional migratory picking companies, captained and contracted, that work a circuit from valley to valley all year, southern soft fruit in early summer, the wine terraces in autumn, the late orchards and the Aldinskog tend-lines after. A crew hits a valley like a well-led muster and is gone before the bruising sets in.
The ripeness-verdict is the Call. When a valley's Call goes out, the calling-horns sound down the rows and the call-riders carry the word to the next fair and the next company, so the circuit turns on the fruit's own schedule and no other. A valley the circuit skips watches its year rot on the branch, and every soul in the country knows it, which is why the circuit, and never any crown, is the thing Baratalda cannot afford to break.
Baratalda is ruled by the Housen, the great cellar-houses, and it is a plutocracy that has never once pretended otherwise. What a house counts is depth: the fair-assessed value of everything it has laid down and not yet broached or sold, its undelivered decades of wine, brandy, and preserved rarities. Each winter the Deep Ledger closes and the Almanack is cried, carrying the year's schedule and the Standings both, and the deepest house on the page rules.
The deepest house holds the seal as Sealhouse; its head sits as Sealwarden, head of state. The government sits in the Sealhouse's own fair-town and the High Fair convenes there, so when the Standings turn, the capital moves. Treaties are entered in the registry and carry forward across changes of house; striking an inherited entry is the gravest act a new Sealhouse can take.
Tithes on the fairs and fees on the seal belong to Baratalda, held in the Common Chest at Negutei. The Sealhouse directs that spending, the roads and bridges, the land's arms on the frontier, the clerks' wages, and owns none of it: lose the seal and the spending-hand passes overnight while the Chest stays exactly where it is. Hosting the High Fair comes from the Sealhouse's own cellars, never the Chest, so rule bleeds the very depth that earns it.
The clerks of the Registry are paid from the Common Chest, assess every house's depth at fair-values, and keep the Deep Ledger and the treaty-registry. They cannot be bought without every rank in the Standings becoming worthless, which is why the Housen themselves police registry-fraud harder than any warden could.
No house picks its own trees. Depth is future fruit, and future fruit needs growers who will sell to you and crews who will come. Tilt the Almanack too little in your own favour and you are out in two years; tilt it too much and the Housen combine against you, or the crews decline your valleys.
Grain flees a catastrophe and replants in a year; an orchard is a generation, and it cannot run. When the Dark Era emptied these valleys the trees were the hostage, and the institution that survived was the crews: moving companies who rode the circuit through the blight-decades keeping abandoned orchards alive, pruning, grafting, and taking their pay in claims, and keeping books: whose trees, what tended, what owed. When people crept back after the sealing, those crew-books were the only surviving record of who held what in the whole east, and the kingdom's titles were rebuilt out of them, row by row. The refounded kingdom, early in the Adventurer Era, wrote its constitution around where power already lived: the ledgers and the circuit.
The chronicles keep one reconstruction-era tale: the warlord who seized the books at Negutei and declared himself king, and found that every crew on the circuit simply declined his valleys, so his kingdom rotted on the branch in a single autumn. Nobody had to fight him. The country learned once that the calendar is the army.
Basque negutegi, winter quarters, drifted. The Registry's town by the southern lake: the Deep Ledger's shelves, the Common Chest's vault, the treaty-registry, all dug into the cellars. Each winter it holds the Winterclose, the weeks when the Ledger closes, the Standings are read from the Registry steps, and the new Almanack is cried. The government moves; the paperwork stays.
Basque sagar + herri, contracted. The great eastern fair-town under Aldinskog's skirts, where the frontier trade concentrates: the harvest-fairs that draw Villtur hunters down across the river to trade game and furs for wine, apple-brandy, and stone-fruit, and where the fair-peace is renewed with the clan-elders.
Baratalda's own stretch of Midarra keeps the quays that ship the vintage south and east, toward Lautara's markets and the ferry-lanes of the Twin Suns crossing. The coast's port-town is its own open chapter in the chronicle.
The northern half of the eastern frontier is Aldinskog (Icelandic aldin, tree-fruit, + skógur, forest, drifted), the fruit-forest, and the name is a claim before it is a description: the great wood is still mostly wild, and Baratalda is grafting it. Kept wood is married onto wild root, row by row, deeper each generation, under tend-right: you hold what you graft and keep only what you keep tending, the orchard cousin of Greenward's reclamation, taming rather than healing.
The work runs from the Baratalda side only. Walk east and the orchard loosens into forest with no line where the kingdom ends, only a depth to which the tending runs, read off the graft-scars ringing the trunks, old silver scars at the settled edge and raw new ones at the deep line. The deep wood is where the country's magical fruit grows wildest, the rare kinds that grow nowhere else on Talan and resist every attempt to move them; the deepest tend-lines exist half for the harvest and half for the hope of coaxing one more wild wonder onto kept root.
Baratalda anchors no single people; it sorts them by clock. Minotaur orchard-families hold most of the rows, the patience that lays stone in Lurrath turned to rootstock, and Minotaur names fill the Housen rolls. Dragonet still-masters run the brandy-crafts, the old blood entirely at home with copper, fire, and forty years of waiting. Kholo carting-lines keep the loads: fruit that must race its own rot to the quays travels in the care of the people who reckon a life by what it kept safe.
And the east is thick with the hunters who stayed: Villtur folk who came down to a fair and kept coming, then kept staying. Settled Orcs captain the crews, the harvest-charge made a peacetime living, three-day windows met head-on, now, by companies that hit a valley like a muster; settled Lizardfolk run the long clocks, above all as the tend-line grafters of Aldinskog, slow to start a line and impossible to shake off one. At the fairs the two countries of their birth trade across a table, and a Sagarri Orc pours for her roaming cousins with a captain's arm-rings on.
Mass life runs on the clocks: a family's morning begins with someone walking the rows and reading them, and its evenings end in the cellar, because every household, however small, lays something down. The custom is pouring the year: occasions are honoured with the bottle of the year they mark, a wedding with the year the couple met, a treaty with the year the border was drawn, a funeral with the year the dead was proudest of.
The visitor sees an idyll, blossom and festival and generous tables, and files Baratalda as the gentlest country on Talan; the native reads the Standings behind every toast, knows which house's depth a frost just cracked, and can tell you exactly how political a gift of the '19 pear brandy is. The young owe a crew-year: a season or three riding the circuit with a picking company before settling to rows or cellar, grower's child and Housen heir alike, and the friendships and marriages of the crew-year are how the country's east and west keep becoming one people. The sanctioned transgression is the night-run past the tend-line, deep into wild Aldinskog by lantern to taste something no one has grafted yet, and every Baratalda adult keeps the memory of one fruit they can never find again.
Baratalda keeps Sarrum plain, the way Greenward does, and reads him as the god who waits: patience is his liturgy here, and the harvest his answer. The orchard rites are small and universal: the first blossom of a row spoken over, and the last fruit of every tree left unpicked, for the god who waits, so that every orchard in the country ends its year with one deliberate act of patience. The fairs open under his peace, and the Housen seal their winter Standings with his name, the steadfast god asked to witness a ranking built out of forty-year promises.
The graft and the hunt. Aldinskog deepens every generation, and the clans across the river run their hunts through a wood their grandmothers knew as wholly wild. The fair-peace holds, because the fairs are worth more to the clans than the deep wood's edge; but roaming voices in Villtur have begun calling the graft a slow theft dressed as gardening, and the settled cousins at Sagarri are asked to answer for it at tables on both sides of the river.
Holds the seal on the deepest and most cautious book in three generations, depth laid in safe cider and safe years. The country's clerks admire the book; the country's poets do not.
Unseated eight winters ago by a frost that cracked its plum terraces, and re-laying bold and long ever since, making no secret of the arithmetic. The country watches the gap the way Sugeiturri's court watches the Rising Water, and every hard spring is read twice, once for the trees and once for the government.
They say that somewhere past the deepest tend-line in Aldinskog stands the First Tree, the wild mother from which every graft in Baratalda ultimately descends, and half the old families swear their oldest scion was cut from it in the crew-book years. The wood-crews say you know its ground when you reach it, because nothing grows crooked there and nothing carries thorns; and the children's version, told at every hearth, is that a fruit eaten from the First Tree tastes of the best year of your life. The tellers disagree on whether that year is behind you or ahead of you, and a Baratalda listener will tell you the disagreement is the whole point.