Dryads

Dryads are long-lived woodland beings whose kinship, community, and concern for their forest shape a revealing encounter with Lock’s family. Their secluded gathering offers shelter to the injured, but also exposes a conflict between the community’s reproductive expectations and Lock’s human upbringing and choices.

Identity and Woodland Setting

The Dryads appear in a forest where the undergrowth thins around a giant maple, whose branches spread over the clearing like an umbrella. They are numerous, gathering among branches, on rocks, and beside tree trunks. The group is strikingly varied in appearance: its members range from thin to squat and from very pale to dark-skinned. Despite the cold, they wear little clothing and show no goose bumps. The narrator recognizes them as Dryads, connecting their presence to the trees and to the natural beauty they share.

The forest community is not simply a collection of strangers in the woods. The Dryads address Lock as their nephew and swarm him with hugs and affectionate attention, as if he were a much younger boy. Their gathering includes relatives who call him nephew and several aunts; the familiarity is so extensive that Ava, accustomed to a family consisting mostly of herself and one other person, feels out of place among so many relatives. The forest itself seems responsive to Angela: when she sighs, the trees sigh with her.

Family and Community

Mar is the first Dryad to emerge from the underbrush. Although she looks about seventeen, her voice sounds far older; Lock kisses her forehead, and she calls him her favorite nephew. She leads him and the others farther into the forest, where the Dryads gather around the newcomers. Their welcome is selective. They dote on Lock and Ezra, and some show sympathy toward the injured Olive, while Ava and Ikka are mostly ignored or inspected with suspicion. Sid, meanwhile, receives admiring attention that makes him stand straighter, only to yelp when the movement pulls at his wound.

Angela, Lock’s mother, is the community’s apparent leader. She enters after some of the Dryads go to fetch her, wearing a forest ranger’s khaki shirt and shorts. Her hair is mostly red, with shimmering green, yellow, and brown strands. The reunion quickly turns into a family exchange: Angela wishes Lock would stay, while he knows she wants more from him than a visit. Her directness and authority distinguish her from the other relatives, but her affection remains evident in the way she holds his jacket and later kisses him on the forehead.

Lock and the Human World

Lock’s place among the Dryads is complicated by his mixed heritage and upbringing. He is half-human and was partly raised by humans, while his cousins are Dryads and, according to him, have children as young as thirteen. His human perspective makes him resist the expectations Angela treats as ordinary. He says he is too young to father children and not ready to raise them; he also points to the way teen pregnancy is regarded in the country where he grew up. Angela counters that he would not have to raise the children himself and says their mothers could come too. Lock refuses, and Angela accepts the refusal for the moment without abandoning her hope of changing his mind.

The encounter also reflects Lock’s history of serving the Coterie. He volunteered himself as a tithe so that Venus would leave the Dryads alone. To qualify for a better-paying position, he changed his body and presentation: he began lifting weights, swimming, and eating more, while Ezra helped him change his wardrobe. The Coterie then sent him into the field with Ava. Ava sees these changes not merely as growing up but as consequences of the organization’s demands—another thing taken from Lock. His protective choice links the woodland community to the dangerous human world beyond it, even as the Dryads’ expectations of him create a different kind of pressure.

Reproduction and Forest Survival

Angela’s insistence that Lock father children is tied to the Dryads’ survival as a community. She says they need fresh blood and can barely keep pace with humans destroying the trees. Her request therefore joins family expectation to ecological anxiety: the forest is home, and the destruction of its trees threatens the community that depends on it. Angela’s appeal is not framed only as a private wish for grandchildren; she presents reproduction as a response to the dwindling capacity of the Dryads to endure human encroachment.

That reasoning nevertheless leaves Lock’s consent at the center of the exchange. Angela proposes that he meet several women and bring a child back to the forest, but he says no. She sighs, the trees echo her, and she agrees to leave the matter for now while making clear she will continue to press him. The scene does not resolve the conflict between collective need and personal choice. Instead, it shows the family negotiating that conflict openly, through an insistent mother and a son who can refuse her.

Narrative Significance

The Dryads widen the story’s idea of family beyond biological and human households. Lock is treated as kin by a large woodland community, while his relationship with them is shaped by both affection and obligation. His choice to enter the Coterie as a tithe protects them, but his return also brings him into a conversation about the children they want him to produce. Care and pressure coexist: the Dryads welcome him as their nephew, yet Angela’s hopes for the community’s future make his body and parenthood a matter of collective concern.

Their forest also provides a pointed contrast to the Coterie’s reproductive violence. The Coterie threatens Ava with confinement and a forced breeding program after deciding she can no longer serve as a field operative. Angela likewise speaks openly of reproduction and the community’s need for descendants, but Lock can refuse her proposal, and she accepts that refusal for the present. This difference does not erase the pressure in Angela’s demand; it clarifies how the story distinguishes an appeal made within family ties from an organization’s coercive power. Through the Dryads, the novel connects kinship, ecological vulnerability, and reproductive choice without making them interchangeable.