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

She smiled. “I haven’t got you figured at all.”

“Good,” he said. “A man of mystery. That’s better than a callow youth.”

The dirt road came to a sudden dead end where a forestry sign marked the beginning of the trail that ran along Redwater Creek. On the left of the road was a narrow drive that wound back deep into the hills. The drive crossed over Coyote Creek on a crumbling humpbacked bridge of stone. At the end of the drive was a white adobe wall with a single low wooden door. A brass bell hung by the door. Fox rang it, and they went inside.

Within the wall was a sprawling Hispanic ranch house of whitewashed adobe. It had a red tiled roof and a peaceful courtyard shaded by a desert willow tree, with a crude wooden bench beneath. A delicate deer, barely bigger than a good-sized dog, sat in the shade of the tree. It regarded them calmly with wide, dark eyes as they crossed the yard, the wooden porch, and knocked on a rustic door.

The man who came in answer to their knock was tall and burly—a leathery old cowboy in dusty denims and a worn Stetson hat. “Come on through,” John Alder said to them. “Lilli is in the back garden. We’ve got a sick raccoon back there she’s trying to give medicine to.”

As they crossed through the ranch house, Maggie got an impression of many large rooms with tiled floors, thick adobe walls, and high corbel ceilings—a tranquil place, shadowed and cool, old, and somewhat run-down. And then they were through the house and out the back door into another walled garden.

Here it seemed almost tropical. There were flowers growing in lush profusion and an oval pool of water reflecting the cottony morning clouds. A couple of dogs were dozing in the shade of a swaybacked mesquite tree. The whinny of horses sounded from somewhere behind the adobe garden wall. “Hi girls,” Fox called, and Maggie heard the horses whinny again.

Lillian Alder was a wirey old woman, her grey hair pulled back into a braid, dressed in well-worn denims like her husband and fancy hand-tooled cowboy boots. She was not a small woman like Dora, but beside her huge husband she seemed as if she was. She held a tiny raccoon in her lap, and an eyedropper in her hand.

“He’s falling asleep now,” she said, nodding at the raccoon. “I don’t want to rise and disturb him. John, can you fetch some iced tea for these kids?”

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

“What’s wrong with him?” Maggie asked her.

“With John? Shoot, he’s always been that way. Loco.” The older woman tapped her head. “Naw, I know, you mean Mr. Raccoon here. He lost a foot in a trap, is what. And now it’s gone gotten infected. So you must be Maggie. Welcome to Tucson. How do you like the desert?”

“Well,” Maggie said carefully as she sat down, “I’m not really sure yet. It’s interesting. Very different from anything I’m used to.”

“I was born and raised here, so this is the norm I compare everything else to. I feel closed in everywhere but the desert. So where is it you’re from then, gal?”

“West Virginia, originally. But I haven’t lived there for years. California is where I was last, and London is where I’ve spent the most time.”

“London.” The old woman’s expression grew wistful. “I’ve always wanted to go to London to visit Kew Gardens, but shoot, the farthest east I ever got was Texas. Did you ever go to Kew Gardens?”

Maggie admitted she hadn’t.

“Lillian used to be a botanist,” said Fox.

“I’m retired, Fox, I’m not dead yet. Once a botanist, always a botanist. It’s part of the hardwiring, like breathing.”

“Do you work with desert plants? It must be an unusual environment to study,” said Maggie.

“It’s fascinating, really. The Sonoran desert is utterly unique. Take these big saguaro cactus. They don’t grow anywhere else in the world but here. It takes them almost three hundred years to grow that tall.”

“And it takes housing developers three minutes and a single bulldozer to bring them down,” muttered Fox.

“Now, now,” said Lillian, scowling at Fox, “I don’t like what’s happening in the valley any more than you do. But even developers don’t knock down mature saguaro. It’s highly illegal, and you know it.”

“No,” he conceded, “they dig them up and sell them to garden centers in L.A. And then they strip the rest of the land down to bare soil, and plant a goddamn lawn.”

“I did see an awful lot of building going on when I was driving here from the airport,” Maggie said. “Those horrible cookie-cutter housing developments, like the worst of southern California.”

“That’s no coincidence,” said Fox. “A lot of these developers are from California. They come in from out-of-state because Tucson has been targeted as a ‘good market.’ They ruin our desert, pocket the money, and hightail it out again. Wiping out in a few months what took thousands of years to create.”

Lillian said, “That’s true, I’m afraid. I’ve spent over sixty years in Tucson, and I’ll tell you Maggie, it’s changed more in the last ten years than in the whole fifty before that. It makes me mad looking at those butt-ugly houses every time I drive into town. It only makes it worse remembering there used to be groves of mesquite and ironwood there.”

“And yet somebody’s buying those houses,” Fox said, leaning back in his lawn chair with his long legs crossed before him. One of the Alder dogs roused itself to come sit at Fox’s knee. He scratched the dog behind the ears, and a grin spread across the canine face.

“Some people just don’t know any better,” Lillian said. “There ought to be some kind of test you have to take before you can live in the desert—to make sure you really want to live here, and not to turn it into New Jersey.”

“Then I would have been