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

moon he could see the Drowned Girl lying there beneath the creek’s black surface. He called to her in words for which there was no human translation.

“Mage,” the girl acknowledged him. She opened her eyes. The water rippled.

“Mage,” he acknowledged the other in turn. “It is the midnight hour. And I have come.”

“So I see.” She rose from the cold creek bed, silt and small fish streaming from her hair. She rubbed her eyes as though she had just woken up, although she never slept. She was mimicking some human or another; she glanced at him to see if he had guessed. Then she waded from the cold creek water and up onto the stoney bank.

Her dress was wet, mud-stained, and torn; he could see through the fabric to the white flesh beneath. Her feet were bare; she was oblivious of the cactus spines, the brambles and thorns. She tossed her head, and fire smoked, and then her cloud of white hair was dry, crackling like static on shoulders so thin and pale they were almost transparent. Her bloodless skin was of a white shading on blue; her slanted eyes were black as coal. And yet she was terribly beautiful; she pulsed hot and cold, like a star.

“The painter is coming,” the Owl Boy told her.

“Juan,” she said, tasting the name. “I am almost finished with this one, which is a pity. He is exquisite.”

“You are driving him mad.”

She acknowledged this with a nod, tilting her lovely head.

“But will he do what needs to be done? Will he hunt? Will he kill, this painter of yours?”

The girl smiled, a sharp little smile.

“And what will you give him in return?” he asked. “What is it he wants?”

“The usual. His dreams are of wealth and fame. He has asked to paint Great paintings.”

He yawned. “How dull. He should learn from Anna. He should ask to paint true paintings instead.”

“Ah, but then he would be dangerous.” She stroked his back, and the boy sprouted feathers beneath the soft pressure of her touch. “And Anna is dead. He’ll learn nothing from her. He does not walk the spiral path.”

The Owl Boy laughed.

She cocked her head. “Now he is climbing up the hill. Come, and you can watch me work,” she invited her partner and her rival.

He flung himself back into the white owl shape, and followed after her.

❋ Davis Cooper ❋

Redwater Road

Tucson, Arizona

Sisters of Mercy Convent

Mexico City

October 1, 1949

My beloved Anna,

Yes, I am writing again. Do you even get these letters, I wonder? Or does someone stop them, your mother perhaps, or the sisters at the convent? I send them out into your silence, still hoping for one small word in return. Can you hear me? Can you see me? Can you forgive me for whatever it is I might have done to drive you away?

The sycamore leaves are turning to gold along the banks of Redwater Creek. The late summer rains have given us a season of flowers—they are covering the hills now. Pink lantana, lush orange mallows, carpets of deep purple verbena and those yellow, fragile-looking things whose name I can never remember and now you are no longer here to remind me. How is it that a land that grieves for you can look so beautiful? For I can feel its grief, a murmur in the stones, a sigh in the wind through the mesquite wood—or perhaps it is my own grief, heavy as granite in the hollows of my heart.

Even your creatures sigh and droop and look to me less substantial now, shimmering in the desert heat. Yes I know, you will say they are not “yours” at all, but they wear the shapes you gave to them. They hover in the trees beyond the house seeming puzzled and perturbed by your absence. The Spine Witch peers in the studio window, hissing and bristling, like an angry cat, when she sees my face and not yours through the glass. The rootmegs gather in the mesquite wood; they no longer flee when I walk by, but simply sit in the shadows of the trees, watching me with wide, dark eyes. What would you have me tell them, Anna? And what should I say to Maisie? Or to Riddley Wallace when he writes to ask when you will send him paintings again?

Forgive me. I will not pressure you. Take what time you need to think, to mend, to do whatever it is you have to do—just so long as you come home again to this sad, drunk poet who needs you. The Rincons need you. The coyotes and the deer and the jackrabbits all need you. I can’t bear to think of you in the flatlands where the stones do not whisper your name. Come home, or let me come to you.

With my heart in my hands,

your Cooper

Chapter Nine ❋

The Spine Witch searches the soil

for grubs and beetles, the skeletons of birds

and discarded poems, their bones

as weightless as breath. Or prayer.

—The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

The sun was already high above the mountains when Maggie rose the next morning. She rubbed her eyes, disoriented. The day had started without her. Thumper lay at the foot of the bed, curled into a ball of fur. She’d been there when Maggie had returned last night, snoring softly in the nest of quilts. Maggie slid carefully out from under the blankets, careful not to wake the girl.

The day was hot, the sky cloudless, as Maggie stepped onto the porch to retrieve the pile of morning mail, including the letters that still came for Cooper, and a thick envelope from London. Beyond the porch were a dozen fat quail, their top-knots bobbing like question marks as they searched out a breakfast of seeds and bugs from the dry and dusty soil. A sidewinder snake divided the group as it undulated across the yard, moving through the sage and the brittlebush with a sideways motion. The quail scattered