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The Dryad's Faller
He has felled trees for twenty-six years. She is the one who was sleeping inside this one.
He has felled trees for twenty-six years. She is the one who was sleeping inside this one.
Kellan Dray is the best hand faller on Washington's wet coast, a man whose stumps have never once told a story he could not stand behind. On the first morning of the Alderon Ridge clearcut, he makes his opening cut into a hollow ancient cedar and opens the heartwood on a sleeping woman.
Nyssa Veral has slept in the Mother Cedar for two hundred and seventeen years, bound by a covenant to witness for a grove that cannot speak. If the Mother falls, she dies with it. If five of the grove's nine sentinel cedars fall, the bond tears her apart. And Kellan's company holds a forty-day contract, a quarter-million-dollar bond, and orders to bring the whole grove down.
Saving her means refusing the cut. Refusing the cut means billing his crew's winter wages, his mill town's survival, and the pension four years from his hands. Pyke, the director who holds the bond, has already hired his replacement.
A faller knows what a hinge can hold. What can a man's whole life hold, when the tree starts talking back?