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

“What happened?”

“She was hurt,” Isabella told her simply, and the look on her face stopped the rest of Dora’s questions. As they turned to go, Dora saw that Angela was limping, leaning on her sister’s arm.

They crossed the wash in the direction of their house, identical from behind in their simple yellow shifts. Their feet were bare on the sand and stones, despite the danger of cactus spines, and each wore something circling the left ankle like a thin blue band. A small coyote, the half-blind one, was sitting on the opposite bank, looking as though he waited for them and panting in the midday heat. As the sisters approached, he didn’t turn and run. He waited there, almost expectantly.

Maggie turned to walk back to her own house, but Dora lingered for a moment more. She watched as one sister stretched out her hand, and the coyote’s pink tongue gave it a kiss.

• • •

Fox put another log on the fire. When the sun went down, the evening would chill and the warmth of the flames would be welcome, but now he was stripped down to his jeans and sweating as the fire grew hotter. His silver bracelet lay on the ground along with his shirt and a small suede bag, leaving only a thin cord of knotted leather tied loosely around his wrist.

Tomás sat and watched Fox work, silently smoking a cigarette. He too was stripped down to the waist, and his hair was loose upon his back. Small white scars puckered the skin across his broad copper chest.

“There’s too much you’re not telling me,” Fox accused the older man crossly. He picked up an ax and brought it down hard on a long length of mesquite wood, splitting the log in two. He picked up one end to put on the fire, but Tomás got up and took it from him. He placed the wood on the fire himself, his movements careful and unhurried.

He turned to Fox. “If you tend the fire like that it will burn with your anger.”

Fox dropped the ax, sat down, wiped his face. “I’m not angry,” he said, “I’m frustrated. I want to know what’s out in those hills.”

“And you think I know?”

Fox was silent.

Tomás laughed. “You think I’m some shaman, white boy? Yeah, you think I’m some ‘wise Injun medicine man,’ like something you seen in a movie somewhere. Or read in some woo-woo book from California.”

“And aren’t you?” Fox asked. It was a question he’d never asked the other man before.

Tomás gave him a broad smile. “I’m just a man. I fix cars for a living, I watch TV, I go to Burger King like anyone else. I haven’t got the secret of the universe. Don’t make me out to be what I’m not.”

“What is this you’re teaching me then?”

“How to listen. To the fire. The water. The wind. Nothing more mystical than that,” he said.

Fox sat and he considered this. “That seems mystical to me.”

Tomás laughed again, at some joke of his own. “That’s because you have only begun.”

• • •

Maggie got back from town before dusk, and put her groceries away in the house. Then she stood out on the porch looking up the canyon, undecided. She could climb to the peak, watch the sun set and pretend she wasn’t waiting for anyone there; or she could find her way to Red Springs and hope that the stag would appear once again.

She chose Red Springs, in a spirit of defiance. Why should she wait for that man to return? She’d been on the peak every night again this week. She was starting to feel like a fool.

She found the trail that Tomás had used, and followed it over the wash, up the hill, past the crumbling house where Fox had grown up, half buried in the creosote scrub. Far up the hill, she could make out the figure of Lillian Alder on an opposite trail. She called up and waved, but Lillian was bent over a plant and oblivious to her.

The sky overhead was turning deep blue, streaked with banners of orange, red and pink. The desert was bathed in a golden light, each cactus, each small tree vivid, distinct. Its beauty stopped her on the path. Something had changed. Something was different ever since she woke up that morning. Her eyes seemed to have adjusted now to the subtler colors of the Sonoran palette. The desert was no longer an emptiness, an absence of water and dark northern greens, but an abundance: of sky, of silver and sage and sepia and indigo blue, of gold desert light, so pure, so clear she wanted to gather it up in her two cupped hands and drink it down.

She rubbed her eyes. Her vision kept changing. One moment it was the way it had been and the desert was just a dry, hostile land. In the next moment it was lovely again, a sentient presence beneath her feet, holding her like a stone in its hand. To be one stone more…, she repeated to herself as she walked on into the tall blue hills, Return me, oh sun, to my wild destiny…

She continued on toward the canyon’s wild heart, toward the sycamore grove and the circle of the springs. The stag would be there. She could almost feel his presence, drawing her closer. She blinked her eyes. Her vision kept wavering. Time felt stretched, as it did in dreams—perhaps she was home in bed dreaming now. But home, where is that? a voice whispered. Was that voice in her head, or in the land?

She reached Redwater Creek’s rocky bank and then she stopped, her heart in her throat. He was there, by the creek, as though he’d been waiting. He wore only his jeans this time, his thick black hair unbound on his shoulders, his green eyes intent on her. She swallowed, and continued up the path. As she drew