Spirit Walker by David Farland

winter, he thought that surely his beautiful wife must have been only a husk of a woman after all, and he had somehow been deceived into believing that he loved her.
    His love for his children and the Pwi was swept away, too, in this madness. And when he lay with the woman upon the soft moss of the forest floor, he felt as if he were buoyed upon waves of desire, and he thought that surely he was giving his love to the goddess Zhofwa herself.
    But when he was done, the beautiful green woman turned her back upon him. He went to stay with her in her home of living trees, but she took no notice of him. During the day she foraged for the dung of giant elks, and buried it at the roots of the pines.
    And in the night she did not give love to him the way that a wife should. Instead she searched among the needles of the pines for grubs and caterpillar nests and then she would squash them, and since she barely took time to find food for herself, she fed upon the dead insects, instead.
    In time, she learned to speak, but at night, she talked only of her work and of her love for the trees, but she never spoke of her love for Tchulpa.
    If he left the room to get firewood, she would take no notice. If he fed her, she did not thank him. Sometimes, even if he tried to simply speak to her, she would only stare away, as if lost in thoughts of trees.
    Tchulpa became sad with the despair-that-leads-to-death, and he realized finally that she had no love in her. Instead, he thought she must be a demon, created by the earth to punish men for how they treat the forests. He remembered his wife, and wished he could see her, but each day he would look upon the Dryad and the kwea of the moment when they first met would come upon him. He would think back on the magic of that time together and become her slave all over again, as if he were a Thrall held in chains by a Slave Lord, and he could not leave.
    Days melted into months and months blended into years.
    After three summers, the Dryad bore a daughter with skin as green as pine needles. Tchulpa became angry, for she had not made love to him during those three years, so it seemed obvious that she had borne a child from another man.
    One day, the Dryad wandered away, and in her devotion to the trees, she stayed away for nights catching moths that were laying their eggs. When Tchulpa found her again, he was furious, for he felt sure she had gone off to sleep with another man while he tended her child. (In those days, the Pwi did not know that Dryads mate only once and give birth slowly over the years; so Tchulpa did not imagine that the green daughter was his.)
    He dragged his second wife home by the hair and tried to make love to her, but she fought him. He screamed and tore his hair in frustration, but she said, “I love only the pines!”
    Tchulpa wondered if she had made love to a tree spirit, and the tree spirit had fathered the green daughter. So he went crazy in his grief.
    This was in the month of Dragon, and the forest was at its driest.
    Tchulpa picked up a brand from his cooking fire and ran outside and tossed the torch into the pines.
    The Dryad ran from the hut with her daughter, and when she saw the fire raging in all the trees, madness came over her. She screamed, and twisted her face into a mask of rage, and took a stick and speared Tchulpa in the shoulder. She leaned toward him, as if she would rip his throat out with her teeth.
    In that moment, Tchulpa saw into her eyes and realized that she was an animal. He had not fallen in love with a goddess, or even a woman, only a lowly beast.
    He ran from her then, and heard the Dryad give a blood-curdling call, a wail more like that of a wolf than a human. It was a pure expression of her grief for the dying forest.
    Tchulpa thought that he was free then, but as he looked back into the forest, he saw many green women with doe eyes chasing toward him, for the Dryad’s call had alerted others of her kind.
    Tchulpa ran for his life. Some Dryads