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

“That’s the way my grandaddy always made it,” she assured him. “He called it coalminer’s coffee. He used to say coffee should be thick as mud and strong enough to put hair on your chest. Then I worried that he was right and it would.”

He gave her that delightful smile again, and handed her her coffee in a blue tin mug. It was strong. It tasted like West Virginia and smelled of a decade long past.

Tomás’s house was a simple place, one large room like the cabin below, with a kitchen, a couch, a big television. A small desk with a computer on it. A pine bed covered with a woven blanket. A Navajo rug hung over the couch and a single Indian flute over the bed. Before the hearth was a red clay bowl filled with herbs, like the one in Fox’s house.

This cabin too had an Anna Naverra painting on one side of the rounded fireplace, and a small framed sketch on the other side that might have been Naverra’s as well. Maggie stepped over to the wall, fascinated. The painting was of the huge granite boulders that topped the distant Catalina peaks, an ordinary landscape of wind-shaped rock and desert sky. Yet as Maggie stood and stared at it, a figure slowly emerged from the stone, a sleeping man, formed from the rock and the sepia tones of the earth. Three red slashes were painted on the back of one hand resting on the ground; the only bright color on the canvas, it drew the eye’s attention. The figure was so subtly rendered that it seemed to waver in and out of her vision; one moment it was there, and in the next she was looking at a simple landscape again. The title was printed next to Anna’s signature. “The One-Who-Sleeps,” Maggie read, recognizing the phrase from one of Cooper’s poems.

She moved over to the framed pencil drawing, lightly sketched on blue-grey paper with a few deft highlights of soft white chalk. The image was of a stag man, and Maggie wondered if it had been the inspiration behind the sculpture Juan had given her. But this creature, although it had the figure of a man, had the face of a stag, not a human face. The stag was pale, its eyes were dark, its rack of horns was heavy, and at the end of each point was a flame. The drawing was unsigned and untitled, but it was certainly by Naverra.

“Have you seen him?” Tomás said.

She turned around and stared. “Have I see a stag man?”

He smiled once more. “I mean our big white buck who runs around the hills here. Haven’t you seen him yet? He’s enormous, not like our little mule deer. He’s been here for years. It used to be a rare occurrence to see him; but now he comes out almost every night, drinking down there by Red Springs. Fox doesn’t believe me. He’s only even seen the buck twice himself. But Lillian Alder has seen him by the springs; and I wondered if you had too.”

“No. But I’ve still never been to Red Springs,” she admitted. “I’d like to. How would I get there?”

“Finish your coffee and I’ll take you. If it’s not too dark to see the trail.”

She swallowed the dregs of her coffee quickly, before they lost the blue light of dusk. Maggie followed Tomás as he stepped from the cabin, making his way through the tall cactus to a path that she’d not noticed before. It was steep and rocky, leading down the mountain in the other direction from Fox’s house. When they got to the bottom, she realized they were on the road between Cooper’s place and Dora’s. The pathway led them through the trees, across the wash, and up the other side. In the distance she could see lights glow in the house where Fox’s sisters lived.

They skirted the bottom of another hill to the spot where the canyon narrowed; then the trail twisted up over boulders and roots along the bank of Redwater Creek. Tomás climbed it easily. For Maggie it was harder work; the footing was uneven, the sky was growing darker, Tomás was a silent shadow ahead. She found the man’s lack of small talk alternately peaceful and unnerving.

And then the ground levelled into a circle of soft, grassy land embraced by stone. The canyon walls beyond were steep, saguaro and ocotillo clinging to the slopes. The spring itself was circled by a tumble of boulders, white granite striped with quartz, and tall white trees that seemed to glow luminescent in the thickening dusk.

“Desert sycamore,” Tomás told her. They were beautiful, almost magical, as they arched over the water below. Their delicate leaves were green and gold, and trembled in the evening wind.

He put a hand on her arm, stopping her. She stood still and forgot to breathe. Against white trees and smooth white rock was the shape of a powerful seven-point buck, so white and still he could have been carved from a piece of the sun-bleached stone.

He looked at them. He knew they were there. And yet he didn’t turn to flee. He stood poised above the mountain spring, and then he slowly bent down to drink. She was standing so close she could see the muscles rippling in the stag’s strong neck.

Maggie let out her breath. The stag looked up, dripping water from his muzzle. Then he gathered himself and he leapt for the hills, crossing the water in one great lunge. His hooves seemed to spark flames where they struck, and something rattled down the mountainside. She looked down. There was a trail of bright blue stones where the stag had been.

Tomás bent down and gathered several stones. “Turquoise,” he said. He put them in her hand. “You keep them. Turquoise is for protection.”

“What do I need to be protected from?” She looked at the raw