Mere Wold vale head hamlet

At the head of the Wold vale, where the lane gives out under the hanger woods, stands a hamlet that nobody lives in. It has stood empty since the winter of 4419, and in the two hundred years since, no family has gone back to it.

That winter the vale did nothing wrong, and that is the heart of the story as the valleys tell it. Every term owed to the power with which the Lady of Mere Wold keeps faith was kept as it had always been kept, to the day and to the loaf, and still something on the far side of the bargain had shifted. For three months there was no road into the vale. Nine households went out of it and never returned, and the hamlet at the top was left standing as it was.

New terms were made in the end, and the vale below still keeps them. Its people will tell a stranger plainly what they do and where the line runs, but not why. In the vale the Lady may mean the woman or the thing she speaks with, and it is thought ill-mannered to ask which. When anyone asks the Quiet Ground's wardens whether a surrender to such a power can ever be taken back, they name that winter, and say that on the human side it never can. The empty houses are what the valleys point to when they teach it, and nobody walks up to look closer.