Stepping across the razor-straight seam into the inside of the displaced grove felt like crossing an invisible threshold between two different climates.
Outside the sixty-four-pace boundary, the native mountain slope was alive with the cool, crisp breeze of morning, the damp scent of subalpine moss, and the chattering of nuthatches in the birch branches. Inside the boundary, the air was heavy, humid, and choking, thick with the pungent, sickening smell of fermenting turpentine and rotting organic matter.
Kezra Venn walked twenty paces into the red gravel prism, her boots sinking unexpectedly into the soft, sponge-like surface. Beside her, Paxa Sel pulled her wool scarf up over her nose and mouth, her dark eyes darting with cold and exact distress from trunk to trunk.
“Look up, Venn,” Paxa said, pointing toward the canopy. “The trees are crying out for their home.”
Kezra tilted her head back, surveying the crowns of the eighty-foot Austrian pines.
For eighty years on their original southern hillside, these trees had grown against the fierce, upward-rushing mountain gales that blew through the Oakhaven gap. To withstand the wind and maximize their capture of the midday arc of the sun, every single pine had developed a pronounced fifteen-degree southward lean. They anchored its heavy taproots deep into the uphill scree while spreading its thickest branches toward the open valley light.
