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

paintings down from a wooden storage loft. The paintings were beautiful, full of rich color, dreamlike images and juxtapositions rendered in the vivid detail that was typical of the Mexican Surrealist style. Owls, moths, clocks, towers, trees with leaves the color of silver coins, floors made of spiral-patterned tiles that dissolved into desert sand: these were common Naverra images that appeared again and again in her work. Maggie looked them over with evident pleasure. And then Fox heard her catch her breath.

The oil painting she held showed the figure of a man standing in the desert, surrounded by the faintly pencilled lines of a circle of slit-eyed coyotes, each holding the tail of the one before it in a mouth full of sharp canine teeth. The man was striking, with long black hair and eyes of an unusual shade of green. His cheeks were etched with pale blue lines. Spirals circled one outstretched wrist. He was pouring water onto the sand; where it hit the ground it burst into flame.

“What is it, Maggie?” Lillian asked. She came over to look at the painting. “Well I’ll be,” she said, looking startled herself. “I didn’t know Anna had painted him. But no, she couldn’t have. No, that doesn’t make sense.”

“Couldn’t have painted who?” Fox said.

Lillian looked at him and hesitated. “It’s just that he looks like a man I met here once. Years after Anna had died. Cooper introduced him as Mr. Foxxe. I believe he was your father.”

“Your father?” said Maggie, and the confusion in her voice matched the feeling in Johnny Foxxe’s heart.

He’d never really believed in Mr. Foxxe. He had come to believe that they were really Cooper’s illegitimate children, and that Mr. Foxxe was just a story. Now suddenly he didn’t know what to think. He could see his sisters in this man, maybe even his own bony face. But how had his father known Anna Naverra? His mother hadn’t come up to the mountain until nine years after Naverra’s death. Unless that had been the story, and Mr. Foxxe had been the truth.

Fox stared at the oil painting before him, trying to make sense of this image, this man. He looked into that half-familiar face, and was not comforted by what he saw.

• • •

They sat together by Redwater Creek, their white toes dangled in the water. A hiker passing by never noticed them. Their limbs were as white as a desert sycamore, their hair the silver-green of its leaves. The hiker looked in their direction, but all he saw were two young saplings clinging to the rocky bank.

Below, the water began to smoke. Flames licked the surface of the creek. They quickly pulled up their feet, and laughed. “You don’t scare us,” the eldest called. Then they put their feet back down again and the flames died out around them.

A woman’s face was barely visible beneath the water’s surface. Cold black eyes stared up at them. Then the eyes began to close. The water cleared. Now there was just the sandy bottom of Redwater Creek, and the slim, white feet of the two young women. Each had a spiral pattern drawn around the bones of the left ankle.

The eldest rose, and with her help the younger woman got to her feet. As they left the creek, the women changed. Silver-green hair turned gold, then brown; white limbs darkened, kissed by sun, red blood beating under the skin. One wore a white dress. The other’s was red; then she changed her mind and was dressed in jeans. They crossed the road and followed the trail that led them through the dry wash bed, the youngest limping as she walked.

The lights went on in the old Foxxe house. Johnny Foxxe’s sisters had come home.

❋ Davis Cooper ❋

Redwater Road

Tucson, Arizona

The Riddley Wallace Gallery

New York City

August 18, 1948

Dear Riddley,

I can assure you that you are wrong—Anna has not found another gallery. When we send the paintings out they will go only to you and to Veirdas in Mexico City, as always. But I must tell you that it is difficult, right now, for me to persuade her to part with them. The new work is quite … personal; and as such, it seems to be difficult for Anna to let the pictures go. After we sent the last crate off, I found her in the studio sobbing. Be patient, old boy. Artists are a sensitive breed and Anna, as you know, is strong-willed as well. She is in a highly nervous state now, and I don’t want to push her too far.

The review you sent was interesting in many respects—who is this Richard St. Johns? We don’t recognize the name. His ideas on the nature of the Surrealist movement are like a fresh wind in a room grown stale, but when it comes to Anna’s work that gust of wind turns to mere hot air. The man is so busy explicating his theories that he has forgotten to look at the paintings.

I know for a fact that Anna has never seen those pieces by Max Ernst; she has never attempted to copy his style; she has never been romantically involved with the man, as Mr. St. Johns implies. (Leonora Carrington was a more formative influence and a better painter besides.) St. Johns disassembles Anna’s paintings like so many jigsaw puzzle pieces—but this new work is not a game or intellectual exercise to its maker, I can assure you. Anna left Theories and Surrealist Manifestos behind in Mexico City. The work has changed. She is painting this land. She is obsessed with it. She is rooted in Arizona now as deeply, as firmly as any tenacious desert tree drawing sustenance from the hard, dry soil. When she told you her muse walks in these hills, she spoke the truth, more than you can know. She will not leave. She will not come east for the next show opening either. You must be content with the paintings, old boy. I’ll