Istora's sacred forest, a band of dense evergreen along the Sova Chyda's middle reaches. Where Klevnaf's Whitewood is pale and silver-barked, the Winterwood is dark and close-grown, dim even at noon. The Istori hold that their ancestors wait here between their lives, lodged in the wood itself, and that the wind moving through the canopy carries the voices of the dead to anyone patient enough to listen for them. Unlike Klevnaf, the Istori treat what they hear as counsel rather than command. The dead are consulted here, not obeyed. The timber Lamenrae sells down the coast is cut from this forest, which is why, to some Istori, the export trade is not commerce but the slow sale of the dead.
Two clearings matter beyond the rest. The older is the grove where the voices are said to gather thickest, the spiritual center of the eastern kingdom, where Istori have come for generations to sit with their ancestors and weigh what the wood tells them. The newer is the Coronation Grove, where Lamenrae had herself crowned rather than travel to the ancestral capital that Klevnaf holds. She chose the Winterwood on purpose, to claim the ancestors' blessing for a coronation the old rules forbade. Her loyalists found it fitting. The realm's traditionalists found it presumptuous, a queen summoning the dead as witnesses to her own breach of their custom, and some of them have not forgiven the choice.
Midday in the Winterwood, and the light is the grey of an hour before dusk. The trunks stand too close to see far between them. When the wind comes up the whole canopy speaks at once, a long dry rustle that rises and falls like talk in another room, and the pilgrims sitting in the old grove go still to catch the shape of it.