Nimara Thornweave knelt at the edge of the tired stand and pressed her palm to a root that had crawled halfway across the path. Forty-three of her people had left the burned lands. Eleven remained. She had promised them a grove, a place humans could not find, and she had been wrong about three stands already. She watched the way the old trunks leaned. She needed them to lean toward each other. If they leaned away, she would bury whoever did not survive the next march and keep walking. Behind her, the young girl would not stay with the others. The child kept slipping back to a stump near the trailhead, where someone long ago had carved a small house into the wood, a door and two square windows and a round window above. The girl traced the door with one finger and whispered to it. She had done this at every camp for a month. Nimara had stopped telling her to come away. The girl called her name now, only Nimara, never Thornweave, and asked if this was the place. Nimara said she did not know yet. She walked the stand slowly. The outer trees leaned outward, tired, their roots shallow and dry. Her chest tightened. She had read this same lean in the last three failures. Then the ground sloped, and the trees changed. Six broad oaks stood in a loose ring around a still pool. Their roots ran toward the water and toward each other under the soil; she could feel the pull through her boots. The trunks bowed inward over the pool like figures around a table. The canopy above them closed into one shape. She stood at the rim and counted the trunks twice to be sure. The girl had followed her. She was holding the carved stump-house in both hands; she had pried it loose and carried it down. Nimara almost told her to put it back. Instead she knelt and set the small wooden house on a flat stone at the water's edge. "Here," she said. "We keep it here now." The girl sat down beside it and, for the first time Nimara could remember, did not fidget. Nimara looked up at the six oaks and began to plan where the first platform would go, how the curved rails would tie into the lowest fork, which branches could hold a sleeping floor by winter. She walked back up the slope to fetch the others. Ten faces turned toward her at once. "This one holds," she said. She did not let herself smile. Hope was still a liability. But she had read the land true, and tonight they would sleep under trees that leaned toward each other, and tomorrow they would start cutting cord for the first house in the branches.