Wrightson is noted for her excellent prose style. Her diction is simple but effective; it is clear, concise, and exact.

She uses many striking images: the wind "drew the fire up the chimney like a corkscrew;" the silence of the mountaintop is "a great quiet, like a roomful of giants thinking;" "the sky was sugared with stars;" "dripping water rang its silver gongs." The rhythm of her language is appropriate to what is being described, and there is variety in her sentence length. Simple declarative sentences are mixed in and balanced with compound and complex sentences.

Modes of speech are suitable to the characters talking. The nature spirits speak in a formal, rather archaic mode; they use numerous images, rhetorical questions, and inverted sentences. The Potkoorok says, "Does stone grow? When the wind rubs over it and the rain beats it and the frost squeezes it...