The Dryads

The Dryads

Two miles up, the Greenmantle ends in light. The canopy stands above the cloud that forms inside the crowns, in sun that blisters bark-toned skin and bleaches leaf-hair pale, and the Dryads who live there farm the sky itself: cloudmoss beds spread through the high limbs where the mist sits, holding the canopy's entire water supply in a green sponge the size of a county. The Nymphs are the smallest tribe, the strangest, and the one the other two defer to without quite meaning to — because the elders of the Heartwood have, for as long as anyone has counted, been drawn mostly from the crown.

That is not an honor the Dryads campaign for. It is what the canopy does. Life above the weather is the antechamber of the art's far edge, and everyone below knows it — which is to say, when a Dryads goes quiet mid-sentence, the whole province has agreed not to ask what they are listening to.

The Crown

Living above the weather means living inside the sky's. The days are blazing; at night the leaves close and the temperature drops forty degrees, and a Dryads's home is a grown burl-house that seals with the leaves. Real rain falls up there, two thousand feet above the forest floor, and real lightning walks the crowns with nothing at all to hold on to — the drop is everywhere, the winds are unbroken, and the Dryads cross between crowns after dark on atlas moths, silent, navigating by stars the rest of the province has never had an unobstructed look at.

And the crown sees. From Highwatch the whole province lies open — weather three days out, smoke the hour it rises, and the southern cut in its entirety, which the Iyara can only hear and the Dryads have watched, crown by crown, for sixty years. Closest to the Heartwood, time runs slow; the crown-stations above the Listening Ring sit inside the slow hours, and the far-seers who keep them return with the seasons rearranged and, occasionally, with things they insist have not happened yet.

Ways

The moth-post. The moth-lofts are the tribe's pride and its post office: atlas moths raised from the caterpillar, flown only after dark, carrying riders and messages between crowns in perfect silence. A loft grants a moth to a rider for life, the granting is the Dryads coming-of-age, and a rider dismissed from their loft is the closest thing the canopy has to an exile.

The long sit. The far-seeing practice: a watcher goes up to a crown-station above the Listening Ring and sits the slow hours, sometimes for what the province below counts as a season. What they bring down is recorded by the Listeners and weighed for years, and the sitters themselves root early — bark at the wrist, a slow morning — which the Dryads regard not as a hazard of the practice but as its direction of travel.

The stormfast. When lightning walks the crown, all work stops, all doors seal, and nothing may be said aloud until it passes — the storm is held to be the sky thinking, and interrupting it is the one impiety the tribe recognizes. Strike-scars are read afterward like a text, and the far-seers have declined, for sixty years, to say what the southern crowns have been reading in theirs.

Relations

The Dryads and the Alseid are the two ends of the tree and hold an old, wordless partnership: the crown sees far, the roots hear deep, and a warning sent down from Highwatch is confirmed from below before the branch country has finished asking what it means. With the Iyara matters are harder. The branch level's reverence for the crown is curdling into the Quickwood's plainest grievance — the elders came from up here, the deliberation is conducted at this altitude's pace, and the holds being lost are not Dryads holds. The Dryads do not defend the pending. They also do not break it, and the difference is wearing thin below.

The court finds them picturesque in the way it finds all mystics picturesque, and has never grasped that the province's intelligence service lives in its treetops. The Concession has: felling a giant takes its crown first, the Dryads have watched two miles of their country come down ahead of everyone else's, and the calmest tribe in the Kingdom has been counting.

Playing One