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

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Crow stepped into the circle of the fire. Beyond there was only darkness. The sky was black and starless, merging with the black of the hills below. One man sat in the fire circle, smoking a cigarette, talking to the flames, although Crow could smell the presence of the other who had departed not long before.

Crow sat down, cross-legged in the dirt, next to the drum that had called him here. Tomás passed him the cigarette. Crow took it, breathed in smoke and flame, and he passed it back again.

Tomás was silent, until he’d smoked the cigarette down to the very end. He didn’t look at Crow. It was a gesture of respect, and Crow was pleased by this.

At length Tomás said, “Who comes to my fire? Man or spirit?”

Crow grinned. He rattled the copper on his wrist. He said, “Which do you think?”

Tomás was silent.

Crow frowned at this. And then he smiled again. “Today I stew and then I’ll bake, Tomorrow I shall the Queen’s child take, Ah! how famous is the game; there’s nobody here who knows my name is Rumplestiltskin…”

But Tomás didn’t know that story. He still sat silent, listening.

Crow grew annoyed. “You must guess,” he growled. “It’s a riddle. You must guess my name.”

Tomás stirred the embers of the fire with his usual careful, unhurried movements. “Brother,” he named the other at last.

“Wrong.” Crow laughed. “I’m no relative of yours.”

“The fire is my brother. And the stones below, and the trees and the cactus on this hill. You’ve entered the circle. You’ve smoked the tobacco. And I name you Brother,” Tomás said.

Crow’s laughter stopped. His smile died. He looked at the other uneasily. He rose, took off a copper band, and flung it down before the other man. Then he disappeared, melting into the dark of the night and the mountainside.

❋ Davis Cooper ❋

Redwater Road

Tucson, Arizona

M. Tippetts

New York, New York

May 9, 1949

Dear Maisie,

I no longer know what to do. Anna has gone away from me, into some private grief of her own. What has happened? Can you tell me this? Anna won’t tell me. The paintings won’t tell me. The stones are strangely silent now. All I know is this: There was a night when Anna did not come home at all. I roamed the hills, calling her name, knowing that on the vast mountainside I had no prayer of finding her. At dawn I stumbled home again. She was sitting there in the shadows of the porch, clothes torn to rags, breasts bared, spirals of blood and red oil paint on her skin. A man sat beside her—with long black hair, a womanly face, tattoos on his cheeks. He smiled, and his teeth were sharp—like a predatory animal.

Anna looked at me sadly. She did not speak. She rose, she took my hands, and collapsed. I carried her into the house; when I looked back, the man, her creature, was gone. I bathed her, put her to bed … and in the morning she laughed the whole thing away. But something changed that night, I am certain. She does not leave the studio now; she no longer walks in her beloved hills. For the first time since we came to this dream-haunted place, I fear for her sanity. I am at my wit’s end. She won’t speak of this. She wants nothing now but to paint.

Maisie, I know she has written to you. You must tell me, will Anna be all right?

Cooper

Chapter Seven ❋

I do not fear the dark, or sleep, or death.

The knife. The teeth of hounds.

I only fear the fool in the wood,

the water, the mirror glass…

—The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

Maggie stepped from the bathtub, dried herself off, and put on an old white shirt of Cooper’s, a big black sweater that used to be Nigel’s, a pair of tight black jeans. She’d slept late, after a night of heated dreams that she’d rather not think about now. The sun was already peeking over the distant purple hills. Soon heat would fill the canyon again, but now the house was cold and the bathwater steamed in the chilly morning air.

She brushed wet hair back from her face, put on ivory earrings shaped like little dangling hands, and a silver ring with an amber stone. She’d had the ring since she was a child; the earrings had been a gift last year from the man she’d been seeing in Mendocino. A guilty look crossed over her face in the old-fashioned bathroom mirror. She hadn’t called Mendocino, or sent a card or even, she admitted, thought about him all that much since the day of her hasty retreat. Instead of heartache, all she felt about the end of that chapter of her life was guilty relief.

It was possible he was feeling the same way, she reflected as she put on her socks and then her new black cowboy boots. It was hard to imagine he’d found her to be a satisfactory person to love. No one had claimed her heart since Nigel. She’d tried to be with men since then, but no one else quite touched the place that Nigel had reached so effortlessly. She tried, but sooner or later she always started feeling those “itchy feet” again.

She sighed as she went into the kitchen. Romance was definitely not her forte. Last night, with Crow by Redwater Creek, was proof again of that—as if she needed more proof. She swung open the refrigerator and took out two of Tomás’s eggs, hot salsa, and flour tortillas. As she heated oil in a frying pan to make huevos rancheros, she made herself think about the meeting with Crow instead of flinching from it in her mind.

She touched on those thoughts gingerly, like a sore tooth, waiting for the sting to come. And it came. She was angry with the man, yes, but just as angry with herself,