A dryad will restack a toppled pile of acorn husks before she does anything else, including defending herself. This is the most reliable fact about her, and the one that makes her easiest to find. Where a stack of husks stands upright on a root flare, stripped clean and sorted by size, a dryad lives within twenty paces. The hands do the work. They are long and strong, with knuckles like walnut burls, and they can balance a tower of husks on a patch of moss that tilts.
The people at Brake, on the east edge of the oak grove, kick no husks and gather none. A child who scatters a stack is walked back at dusk to rebuild it, and the dryad, by all accounts, supervises with great satisfaction. She drinks rainwater from the cups of leaves, takes sap from a single hornbeam on a schedule, and eats acorn meal she grinds between two flat stones. She leaves behind chewed husks, a smear of pale sap on the bark, and a faint polish on the stone where she sits.
Her body is a wedge. I measured it from behind a hornbeam at Lund, with a carpenter's folding rule held at arm's length against her shadow: twenty-two inches across the shoulders, nine at the ankles, where the feet go into the root and stay. The skin is warm gray-brown bark, grooved in fine vertical lines that deepen at the elbows. The face is fine and calm, with high cheekbones and a gentle mouth. The eyes are amber and have no pupils, so it is hard to tell what she is looking at until she turns her head, and when she does it is usually toward you, with patience. Each evening she walks the same nine steps along her root flare, turns, and walks them back, whether or not anyone is watching.
Her hair is a thick fall of oak-leaf curls, rust in the outer layers and green near the scalp. On her left forearm she wears a band of pale mushroom caps, which she tends without looking at them. On my first visit the band held eleven caps. On my last, two autumns later, it held nine, and the bark around the gap had closed over smooth. A hornbeam at the Lund end had come down that spring, and her nine steps had shortened to seven. A man named Dorrit Pask, who cuts wood on that side, says she never speaks to him but moves her stack an inch closer to his path each week, so that he will see it. At her hip, from a cord, hang five acorn husks, nested one inside the next.
- Classification
- Tree-bound fae
- Habitat
- Old oak and hornbeam groves
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 5 ft tall, slight build
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Sylvan groves
- Binomial
- Quercella sylvestris
- Diet
- Rainwater, sap, acorn meal
- Temperament
- Gentle, patient, devoted to her grove