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

“All right then. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Maggie said, and she followed after the Foxxe sisters.

Dora turned to the house. The lights were still on in the house and the studio; Juan was still up. She went inside through the kitchen door. She could smell smoke as she entered the house. Juan had a roaring fire going; he was standing by the hearth looking red-eyed and haggard. There were pieces of dismantled frames strewn around him. His pictures were gone from the wall.

“What are you doing?” Dora demanded.

“I’m burning shit,” he said tightly. “Don’t start on me, Dora. These are my paintings. I can’t stand them any longer.”

“Those are our paintings. That’s our life you’re burning. Our old life back in Vermont. Goddamn you Juan,” she said, her voice breaking as she crossed the room.

He looked at her flatly. “You’re drunk.”

“And you’re a bastard. How dare you burn all that beautiful work?”

“They’re bad. They’re all wrong. I don’t want them anymore.”

“Well, I do. I loved those paintings,” she said, furious. She’d worked hard for those paintings, too. She shoved past him and reached into the fire to pull a canvas out.

He snatched it away and she reached for another. It was their marriage that was going up in the flames. He grabbed her, pulled her away from the fire. She struggled with him, clutching the charred painting. He shook her, struck her, but she wouldn’t let it go.

“Those are shit, don’t you see that?” he said, wild-eyed. He hit her again, harder this time. She dropped the canvas, stunned by pain, reeling, falling against the couch. “They’re shit, they’re all shit. I’m not that man anymore. Stop making me be that man. I want to be good. I will be good. I won’t let you stop me. All this, this goddamn money-guzzling house, all this stuff, it’s all shit, why can’t you see that?” She huddled on the floor, her arms protecting her face, as he crossed the room grabbing objects, books, art from the walls, tossing them all to the flames. “We think we’re so great,” he railed at her. A book sailed past her, grazing her arm. “These stupid paintings, your little stories, our little lives—we don’t hold a candle to them. They laugh at us. They think we’re pathetic. And we are. They’re the ones who are beautiful. Anna understood. Why can’t you understand?”

He pulled her up, and shook her, hard, his voice worn raw and ragged. “Why can’t you just understand, Dora? Why does it have to be like this?”

She bit down on his arm; when he jerked in surprise she was able to break from his bruising hold. “Leave me the hell alone. It’s you. It’s not me. Don’t you put this on me.”

She ran for the bedroom and locked the oak door, hearing things crashing heavily behind her. The cats had retreated to this room, and the dog was cowering on the floor in the corner. Dora slid to the rug beside Bandido, and buried her face in his rough black fur. Tears burned her eyes but they did not fall as she heard things smashing, his voice still railing. She prayed the place didn’t burn down around them. She ought to call someone. Maybe his parents. Maybe even the police. But how could she do that to him? This was Juan, her husband, not some redneck wife-beater. That didn’t happen to people like them. She sat holding tightly onto Bandido, feeling sober, and sick, and frightened now.

After a while she heard a door slam. And then there was silence. She waited. But Juan did not return—he had probably gone to the hills, to wherever it was that he went. This time she was glad; she wanted him gone. She stood, shaking. She would lock up the house. When he returned, if he returned, he could spend the night out in the barn. When this madness passed, she would let him back in. And then they would talk. Or else she’d leave.

She opened the bedroom door cautiously, feeling heartsick as she surveyed the damage. She was a wreck, one eye swelling shut. The big room was a wreck as well. And nothing remained on the walls now but the picture by Anna Naverra. Dora crossed over to it, hating it now. She took it down. It ought to burn too. But no, none of this was Anna’s fault. She’d give the painting back to Maggie; she didn’t care what Juan would think of that. She looked down at the ghostly white “Mage” in distaste. She didn’t want it anymore.

She put it on the floor, faced against the wall. Then she gave a small cry as she looked into the hearth. Her copies of The Spine Witch were smouldering there along with Juan’s old paintings and drawings—every single painstakingly handmade copy of the little book that Dora had. She felt her legs give way beneath her, and she sank to her knees on the cold slate floor. She pulled a charred page from the fire and ran her fingers across the unburned edge, a scrap of back type on thick cover stock embedded with cactus spines, mesquite leaves. She watched as the flames turned the rest into ash. And then, finally, the tears fell.

• • •

The boy sat still, perched on one of the granite boulders that had tumbled into Redwater Creek when the One-Who-Sleeps last stirred, or stretched, or turned in his dream of stone.

The boy’s body was formed of human flesh, but his two arms were a white owl’s wings. He closed his eyes and concentrated, and then he was even more human still, with arms that ended in perfect human hands, and the smooth, hairless groin of a young boy. He wore only a mask of feathers that covered and formed part of his face, and a necklace with a turquoise stone set into a thin piece of copper.

He looked down into the dark water. In the thin light of the waxing