The Vale of Fingers

No two corners of the Vale are quite alike. It is one basin, but a broad one, and the country changes as you cross it: worked fields give way to cold uplands, uplands to wind-scoured coast, coast to drowned forest, and forest to the red and broken land of the south. The name comes from the north, where four narrow peaks stand above every other height, like a hand half-lifted and left that way. These are the Fingers, and from their feet the region takes its rivers, its weather, and its name.

At the centre lies Midvale, the worked heart of it: hedged fields and drainage cuts, mills and crossroads and storehouses, each village set a walk apart from the next. Little of it is truly wild — even the fallow ground and coppiced groves are land resting, not land abandoned. It is the plainest region and the one least able to be spared, the country that feeds the rest and keeps the records straight.

North of it the land climbs into Northvale, colder and older, where snow shuts the roads for much of the year and many of those roads are older than the laws meant to run them. Here are longhouses and shared hearths, oaths that are remembered, hospitality given by strict rule; and everywhere, half-swallowed by forest and stone, the ruins — some from the Age of Song, some from the Sundering that ended it — their purpose long forgotten by the people who now live among them.

West, the Vale meets the sea. Caelond is rain and stone: rocky hills and open moor, dry-stone walls where the south would set a hedge, grazing where the soil runs too thin for the plough, and the Vale’s great ports strung along the Everfall shore, where word from distant waters comes in before it reaches anywhere inland. East is the opposite country. Eastryn begins in river and wetland and thickens, mile by mile, into forest so close the paths must be cut open again each season; deep within it stands Mount Tirhallow alone, and the further a traveller goes, the easier it becomes to lose the road, the hour, and the way back.

South, the ground darkens. The Vaelmark is iron-red and dry, a march of old battlefields where rain and drought still turn up bones and broken gear, and where the towns hold close to the garrisons that watch the passes into the Ashlands. It was richer once, and learned — a southern road out to the wider world — but that road is gone, and what stands now stands among truncated roads and foundations that lead nowhere, kept alive by watch-rotation and habit more than by trade.

For all these differences, one thing holds the length of the Vale: its people live mingled. A single town will keep a dozen ancestries under its roofs, sharing the same market and the same saints, bound by trade and habit more than by blood. A settlement of one people alone is a rare thing — not unheard of, in the remote valleys and the older quarters, but rare enough to be remarked upon. Whatever else divides the regions, the mixing is the common ground.