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

mountains at sunset, the desert spirits Terri shows us are both beautiful and dangerous, faithful and capricious, inhuman and fascinated by the habits of humanity. Their actions and tastes are mysteries, as incomprehensible to us as ours are to them. Where they live, mystery is everywhere.

It makes sense, then, that a genuine mystery lies at the center of The Wood Wife. Every page bristles with questions: Why did Davis Cooper leave his house to a woman he had never met? Was he the father of the young man who lives on his property? What drove his painter lover from the desert she loved? How in the world could he have drowned in a dry riverbed?

As a mystery must, The Wood Wife answers these human questions, satisfying and delighting us in the process. But those answers lead us to more questions, questions that cannot be so easily answered, about myth and the nature of reality and time and love and home and art.

As a writer, one of the things I have always loved about The Wood Wife is its examination of artists and their relationship with their art, with their muses, with each other. Each artist she mentions—remembered, present, historical, invented—wrestles with the knowledge that their art is never really going to match their inspiration. I don’t think I’ve ever read a contemporary novel in which artists play such a central role. Maggie is a poet, Davis Cooper is a poet: both try (or give up on trying) to catch the inexpressible in words, trap the universe in type on a page. Cooper’s lover, Anna Naverra, is a painter, as is Maggie’s neighbor Juan. But other characters make it clear that painting and writing, dancing and music are not the only arts that can build a bridge to the spirit world. In Terri’s world, gardening and building, cooking and healing, rescuing wounded animals and living intensely and beautifully are arts as well, with their own skills and frustrations.

For me, then, The Wood Wife is a book about how fantasy grows out of myth and how myth grows out of the land; how not all mysteries should be explained; how anyone who creates beauty and order is an artist. For others, The Wood Wife might be a different book. Like myth itself—like the desert or the moors or the mountains or the ocean—we see in The Wood Wife what we need and take from it what we can. This book—and Terri’s paintings—have opened my eyes to the possibilities of magic, encouraged me to listen with attention and to be aware of the messages inherent in the scents and textures and tastes of the world. It has informed the way I approach the new places I visit and the way I write about places I know. It has changed other people’s lives. Perhaps it will change yours.

The Wood Wife is for

Brian, Wendy, and Toby Froud,

with love.

And in memory of Herbert Emil Rasmussen

(1916–1994), who is greatly missed.

Who wants to understand the poem

Must go to the land of poetry.

—Johann Wolfgang

von Goethe

Prologue ❋

On the night that Davis Cooper died, coyotes came down from the hills to the town in the desert valley below. They came from the Santa Rita Mountains in the south. From the Tucson Mountains in the west. From the Catalinas in the north. From the Rincons, where the sun would rise over the dead man’s body.

They entered the sleeping city, shadows travelling stealthily through a network of dry riverbeds, slipping through the streets, through parking lots, through drainage tunnels and alleyways. There was one small boy who saw them pass, his nose pressed to the window glass as four, ten, twenty coyotes drifted through suburban yards, headed for some wilder place where the child longed to follow. Later his mother would tell him it was only a dream, and he would believe her.

The place where the coyotes gathered—by the hundreds, a sea of silver fur beneath a moon like a bright new coin—was not a place that one would easily find on any city map. Davis Cooper had known that place. One other had found it, and returned. Now she ignored the calling song. She shut the window, sat down at her kitchen table, lit another cigarette. She was free now. Free. The word tasted sour. Her heart was as heavy as a stone.

• • •

Johnny Foxxe made a camp among the trees at Deer Head Springs, high in the Rincon Mountains. In the city below on the desert floor the spring night had been soft and warm, but here it was sharp, biting through his denim jacket and the flannel shirt beneath. He gathered deadfall for a fire. The wood was dry and lit easily. The smoke streamed upward to the stars and marked his presence, if anyone watched.

He breathed in familiar mountain smells and bent down at the lip of the springs to taste the sweetness of the water. Deer Head Springs was on a trail so steep that few ever climbed it except the animals who had given it its name: the small, shy desert mule deer, and the elusive white stag whom he’d glimpsed only twice in all his years on the mountain.

The first time he had seen the stag had been by Red Springs, many years before. The second time had been right here, two months ago, on the day he’d left the mountain. He smiled. Now he was back again. It was several miles by mountain trails to the Red Springs house where he’d been born, but the entire length of the Rincon range was home to Johnny Foxxe. Each time he left it, it summoned him back. He’d never been able to resist its call. No woman, no job, no other ties had