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

easel. It was streaked with pale ghosts of color. She realized its image had been wiped away by the paint-soaked rag discarded on the floor. The other canvases in the room were blank, or had their faces turned to the wall. On the table was a single sculpture, and Maggie moved closer to see it.

It was the image of a man with the horns of a stag, formed from some kind of plaster or clay of a terra-cotta color. Unlike the other work in the room, this was in fact a breathtaking piece. It, too, was disturbing, but compellingly so. The body was crudely rendered, a simple cylinder, roughly textured and wrapped with knotted leather cords from which hung hag-stones, copper beads, and a single feather, pure white. A pattern of simple spirals ran around the figure’s base. From the shoulders up, the figure had been more realistically sculpted, the slanted eyes, the thin, stern face with lines etched across the cheeks. Stag horns arced from the figure’s brow, carved of mesquite wood.

She swallowed and found her voice again. “This is extraordinary, Juan.”

But the sculptor frowned and shook his head. “It’s still not right. I just can’t get it right. I’ll have to keep working on it.”

“No,” she said quickly, surprising herself by the vehemence in her voice. “Don’t. Sometimes you just have to stop. This is finished, don’t you see that?”

She wondered if he would take offense; but Juan frowned and considered this. “Who was it,” he asked, “who said a work of art is never finished, merely abandoned? Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s time for me to abandon it.”

Relief flowed through her; she did not know why. Yet she knew that this work should not be changed. “Is it for sale?” she asked carefully.

Juan looked startled. “Why? Do you want it? Take it then. If it’s here, I know that I’ll keep messing with it. It would be good of you to take it away. Consider it a housewarming present.”

“Are you certain? I don’t—”

He cut off her protest. “I’m certain. But it’s still drying, so you’ll have to handle it carefully. And don’t think you’re getting it scott free, mind you. Dora is going to make you sign every one of your books that she’s got in the house—and probably ten for Christmas presents as well.”

The young man smiled, his mood changing, as though a great weight had been lifted. The tension left his smooth, brown face; the smile he gave her was sweet, and teasing.

“It’s a deal,” she said. “And thank you. I promise to give your deer man a good home.” At least for as long as she stayed here, she thought as she walked back to the kitchen with Juan. And then what on earth would she do with it? She was in the habit of traveling light. Well, she wasn’t going to worry about that now; she was too pleased with the gift.

Fox’s truck was parked in the yard, and the man himself was in the kitchen. He joined them for breakfast as Dora had predicted, downing more pancakes than Maggie would have thought possible considering his lanky physique. When they finished, Juan carefully packed the sculpture up and Fox put it in the back of his truck. Maggie signed copies of her books, surprised to find Dora even owned her old poetry editions. She borrowed a copy of Dora’s Spine Witch, then she set off for the Alders’ with Fox.

Maggie looked back at the stag man’s box anxiously as they bumped along the heavily rutted road. She hoped it would survive the trip. It was a haunting creature, with those thin, scarred cheeks, those slanted eyes full of secrets. It reminded her of the man on the hill, whose beautiful face had carried similar lines. That man had turned up in her dreams last night, she remembered suddenly.

In the dream his chest had been painted with spirals that dipped to the curve of his belly, his hips, and the soft, paler skin above his groin. She felt her cheeks flush, remembering the heat of the dream, its stark eroticism. She could still taste his kisses, as though they had actually happened in waking life. Good lord. How would she meet him again without stammering with her embarrassment? She wondered who the stranger was and she put the question to Fox.

“Native American? Long black hair?”

“Well—part Native American anyway.”

“Then you mean Tomás. Your other tenant.”

“He’s my tenant? The auto mechanic?”

“That’s right. Your description sounds like him. Tomás is Tohono O’odham on one side of the family; Navajo and Anglo on the other. You met him on that upper ridge on the trail that runs above his house?”

“Yes. Does he live all alone up there?”

Fox nodded. “He’s got a married daughter in Flagstaff, and an ex-wife on the San Xavier Reservation. And other family all over the place. But he lives here on his own.”

“He has a grown daughter?” He didn’t seem that old.

“Well, he was pretty young when he had her, I reckon. But I don’t really know how old Tomás is. It’s not the sort of thing you ask people. I wonder why? How old are you, then?”

“Me?” she said, startled. “I just turned forty.”

“An excellent age,” said Fox.

“So how old are you?” she asked, amused.

“Seventy-three going on six,” he told her. “Or thirty-five. Take your pick.”

“Thirty-five? I thought you were younger than that,” she said, hanging onto the door of the truck as they flew up the rutted dirt road. In cowboy boots, an old flannel shirt, and jeans so ripped that his knees showed through, he could either pass for a college student or else a rock musician. He wore a silver Hopi bracelet on his arm, and a gold earring glinted in one ear.

“Hmmm,” Fox said, “I don’t think that’s a compliment.” He wheeled around a drainage ditch and then a fallen paloverde limb.

She shrugged. “But doesn’t everyone want to look younger these days?”

“I guess. Damned if I know why. So