The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

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Crow climbed the funnel of rock that led to the top of Rincon Peak. The rock was sharp beneath his bare feet. A strong wind whipped his long, black hair. When he reached the top, he sat under a star-filled sky and waited. At last he heard the boy approach, a rush of air, footsteps on stone.

“The man is dead,” the boy told him, angry, daring him to deny this.

“Yes,” Crow replied mildly. “It’s been six months since you’ve been gone.”

The boy ignored this quiet reproof. Time, as yet, meant nothing to him. “Then who stands guard over the east?”

“Not I. Not you. The stars still watch. The rocks still sleep. Nothing has changed, my deario.”

“You lie. He’s dead. He’s gone. And you lie.”

Crow shrugged. “And what if I do? You know who I am, and what I’m like. All things must be true to their nature. Even the dead. Especially the dead.”

The boy laughed. And laughing, flung himself right over the mountain’s edge.

Crow shuddered. And then he laughed himself.

The boy had left a white feather behind. Crow picked it up, tied it into his hair, then began the long descent.

❋ Davis Cooper ❋

Redwater Road

Tucson, Arizona

H. Miller

Big Sur, California

October 5, 1947

Henry, you old bugger,

You are entirely wrong about deMontillo’s latest. How you can get excited about that self-serving puffery disguised as poetry is completely beyond me—all that pathetic he-man verbiage about the terrible beauty of battle when we all know he spent the war safe in his mistress’s villa, waited on hand and foot by sloe-eyed Moroccan girls (or was it boys?). This sudden critical appetite for deMonty the Perpetual Dilettante is bewildering, and you, at least, ought to have better sense.

By now you’ll have read about the floods. Our land remained dry, of course, being so far up in the mountains here, but we were cut off from the valley for several weeks. Redwater and Tanque Verde creeks flooded over, entirely washing the roads away. I tell you, I was beginning to go stir-crazy, cut off from the mails and the news of the world—but Anna was in her element. I swear she wishes it would flood again. It’s gotten so she doesn’t want to see anyone with the single exception of yours truly, and on some days barely that. She is obsessed with these new paintings of hers, and they are, indeed, magnificent so how can I complain when the washing piles up and dinner is beans on toast again? I want to get a girl up here to do the work, but Anna won’t have it. She’s shy of her creations now—she won’t paint if anyone else is around.

She has taken to roaming the mountain by night and it’s no good trying to stop her with tales of rattlesnakes or wolves or mountain lions, let me tell you. She’s meeting her muse out in those hills. When she returns there is a fire in her eyes and she works like a woman possessed by spirits until she drops in exhaustion. She is strong and brown, and so terribly thin. She has never looked more beautiful to me. I am frightened of this intensity, and yet I am stirred and fascinated. The process of creation seems to pour directly from the ground through her small body into the paint.

My own work, it comes … in bits and pieces, dribs and drabs, it comes, it comes. I am nearly done with Exile Songs and count myself an exile indeed, from Europe, from Paris, from the cafe life which the war has stolen from us all. Perhaps when this collection of poems is done I’ll be able to lay those ghosts to rest and resign myself to this raw, brash land; but so long as I work, I am back there again, sitting in the Paris streets with you and Fred and Brassai and the rest. Then I leave the page and I leave the desk and I find myself here, on a mountainside, in the desert, the farside of Nowhere. In truth, Nowhere is as good a place to be as any other—it doesn’t matter where I am so long as I can do my work and live on the streets of Memory.

Yet for Anna, in her own exile, place has become the crux of her being, the source that now feeds her art in a way that I am still trying to grasp. The Red Springs is just water to me, not the well of inspiration it is for Anna; I see no salmon swimming in its depths, no hazel nuts falling from the trees. I have no muse. I struggle on my own. Every word, every line is chiseled with great effort from the hard white block of language.

Exile Songs will be published next spring. And then deMontillo better watch his ass.

Yours as ever,

Cooper

Chapter Two ❋

The hills call in a tongue

I cannot speak, a constant murmuring,

calling the rain from my dry bones,

and syllables from the marrow.

—The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

Maggie woke early, with a wrenching sense of dislocation. She stared at the water-stained ceiling above her and tried to recall just where she was. On a mountainside, in Davis Cooper’s house. The sky outside was a shade of violet that she’d never quite seen before.

She got up, washed, put her bathrobe on and padded into the kitchen. She’d always been an early riser; she felt cheated if she slept too late and missed the rising sun. She cherished the silver morning light, the stillness, the morning rituals: water in the kettle, bitter coffee grounds, a warm mug held between cold hands, the scent of a day unfolding before her, pungent with possibility.

As the water heated, Maggie unpacked the bag of provisions she’d brought along: dark Dutch coffee, bread, muesli, vegetables, garlic, a bottle of wine. In the small refrigerator were eggs, cheese, fresh pasta from Los Angeles, green corn tamales from downtown Tucson. The