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

“Ask him,” said Tomás, nodding in the direction the stag had taken. “It’s getting darker. We should go back, but now you can find your way here again.”

She nodded, and followed him down the creek. Six blue stones made a bulge in her pocket. The seventh she clutched tightly in her hand.

• • •

She stood in the bedroom doorway, her long ears cocked, her nose twitching at the pungent, unfamiliar smells. If the Spine Witch hadn’t been there beside her, she would have fled back into the night. Not from fear, as when the hounds had come. But from a sharp and deeply rooted shyness … of the house, of the woman, of the scent of humankind. She whimpered, standing with one foot inside the door. It was almost too much for her to bear.

The Spine Witch showed no such emotion, but only a cool curiosity as she looked at the woman fast asleep in Cooper’s bed. She touched the dark hair and smooth, white cheek. She poked the warm flesh covered by sheets. The woman moved and the Witch jumped back, her useless, tattered wings fluttering and her long, boney feet splayed on the ground.

The stones were on a table by the bed. Seven blue stones, in a shallow yellow dish. The Spine Witch scooped them into her hands. Then she studied them, and she put one back. The rest she tucked into a flap of fur that covered her belly just like a pocket.

When the Spine Witch turned to go, the other one hissed and shook her head. “You took. You took. Now you give something back.”

The Spine Witch paused. She’d forgotten that. She looked at the woman in Cooper’s bed. She bent close and kissed one closed eyelid, and then she kissed the other. Then she looked at her small companion and grinned, flashing milky, sharp white teeth.

They crept out of the poet’s house again, leaving the blue front door ajar behind them as they went.

❋ Davis Cooper ❋

Redwater Road

Tucson, Arizona

H. Miller

Big Sur, California

October 11, 1948

Henry,

I didn’t send poems in the last letter because I have no poems to send you. I have not written a poem in half a year—not since Exile Songs. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to need a wordless time of gestation while the next poems slowly form.

I don’t yet know if I even have the skill to bring them to the page. The mountains have overwhelmed me, Henry. Their raw beauty has struck me dumb. Anna has learned to capture their essence in oil paint, and I must do the same with words but I don’t yet know that I can.

I am reading, reading, devouring books. Natural history, the works of Jung. Myth, folklore, and fairy tales. I came across a story that my Irish granny used to tell: A midwife is summoned to a grand house to deliver a wealthy man’s child. She’s given a salve to put on the babe, but some of it gets into her left eye—and then she can see that the man and his wife and the child are faeries, all ragged and thin. Through her right eye she can see a big room, a four-poster bed, and white linen sheets. Through her left the room is just roots of a tree and the bed but a pile of leaves.

For Anna, the paint is a salve in her eye. I want to see as a painter sees. We spend whole days out in the hills. The nights are dark and growing cold. I am learning to wait, to watch, to listen. I have never been a patient man. I’ve never been so empty of words, and never felt so full.

Yours as ever,

Cooper

Chapter Six ❋

The year has turned. Slim girls are

shedding leaves, preparing for winter,

while I push backwards, shoulder hard

against the wheel…

—The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

Dora dumped the contents of the bottom dresser drawer onto the bed. “It’s all sweaters in here,” she said. “What do you want me to do with them?”

Maggie came out of the closet, carrying another armful. “Just box it up. I’ll have Fox go through it in case there’s anything he wants to keep. The rest I’m going to donate to a homeless shelter downtown. Make sure you check out all the pockets. Don’t throw out any lists or notes.”

“I won’t,” Dora promised, sorting through the clothes. She thought it was good that Maggie was finally making space for herself here. It was too creepy that the house still looked like Cooper might return any moment. But bits and pieces of Maggie were slowly appearing in the old man’s rooms: Postcards from Europe clipped to the fridge. Juan’s deer man sculpture in the living room. Photographs tucked in the bedroom mirror of her friends, her grandfather, the woods of England, and her ex-husband holding a cat.

The paintings she had chosen for the walls were different from the ones that Cooper had hung there. In the living room was a picture of a woman stitching the pages of a book into a blanket; a naked young man called The Star Blower hung on one wall in here. Above the bed was an abstract print that clearly belonged to Maggie, not Cooper. Rich with luminous color and texture, it was a lush, exuberant piece of art, unlike the melancholy Naverras.

“That’s lovely,” Dora commented, nodding at the picture.

“My friend Tatiana Ludvik did that. It’s of the light in a Tuscan hill town near Florence, where we spent one summer.”

“You’ve been so many different places,” Dora said to Maggie, her voice wistful. Then she smiled. “Well I think it’s good you’re cleaning out and making this your home now.”

Maggie deposited a box on the bedroom floor and sat on it, long-legged and lanky, wiping beads of sweat from her brow. She was wearing one of Cooper’s undershirts, and her black trousers were rolled up to the shins. “To tell you