The Glass Orchard of Tarrin

Dawn came to Tarrin in the taste of seawater and the first, tentative shimmer of the orchard. Lio Mara walked the narrow paths between the glass trees with a basket cradled on her hip, the weave of willow warmed by her palm. Each tree stood like a patient sentinel — trunks of driftwood and bronze, branches braided with thin rods of spun glass. From those branches hung fruits: bowls of blown crystal, pears and apples, spheres and oblongs, each one a small, secret world. When she moved, the glass chimed, a soft music like coins on a tide, and the sound threaded through the cottages along the slope where fishermen and seamstresses still left their doors open to the sea. Lio had learned to read those sounds as others read the weather. A stutter in the high notes meant a storm brewing; a deep, steady toll meant the orchard slept easy.

Her hands smelled of salt and the faint tang of the orchard’s slow, sweet resin. She reached for a fruit the size of her palm and let the light it kept spill across her knuckles. The fruit showed a memory: a small kitchen, her mother’s hands clapping flour into a pan, the aroma of baked fish and lemon. Lio did not watch like a visitor. She watched like a keeper tending a lamp. Some keepers hid the fruit in rough chests; Ansel, the old man who had taught her to breathe with the orchard’s slow cycle, taught her to let the fruits speak. “A memory is a thing to be listened to,” he had said, his voice like someone who had spent many winters listening to the sea. “If you lock it away, it withers. If you let it be seen, it teaches.”

The village of Tarrin owed its name to that teaching. Sailors followed the orchard’s reflections to steer by tides that bent strange among the isles; mothers eased frightened children with borrowed laughter glinting from a bowl; grave dwellers unlatched a clear sphere and said the names they feared to forget. The orchard’s fruits were not merely pretty to look upon; they were instruments, mirrors, consolation. Lio felt their usefulness in the pressure of the rope against her shoulder as she climbed toward the upper terraces, where the light pooled like warm oil. A gull cut the air above, angled into the wind, and a child’s laugh rose from the quay below. She thought, for a moment, that the world was the sum of small, honest noises.

Ansel met her at the topmost row with a coat patched in linen and a stool tucked under one arm. He had the slow, deliberate steps of someone who measured life in plantings and prune cycles. "Morning," he said without ceremony. His eyes still held the glass-smooth patience of his profession. His knuckles were knotted; he used them to test the thickness of the fruit rim. "We need the white ones today. The fisherfolk asked for the tide-memory bulbs. You’ll go with Etta when she returns?" Lio nodded. The white fruit hummed in the basket like a contained wind, and she turned it so that its tiny scene of a net being mended glowed toward Ansel. He smiled, and for a second the orchard’s small, steady magic felt as if it had been stitched into the village’s skin for as long as the sea itself.