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

Old folktales recorded such occurrences of fairies impregnating human women, and creating changeling children. She found she could easily imagine that the shy Foxxe sisters had parentage that was only half human. But then she thought of Fox himself, sun-browned, lean, and … solid, was the word she came up with. She thought of him swinging a hammer on Cooper’s roof, and playing the accordion last night, and putting away ten of Dora’s enormous pancakes in one sitting. She shook her head. No, she just couldn’t see it. Unlike his sisters, Fox was one of the most down-to-earth people she’d ever met.

Maggie sighed deeply, thoroughly confused, as Lillian finished in the last cage.

“Honey,” said Lillian, “you’re white as a sheet. Let’s get out of this sun and get some grub into you before you faint clean away on me.”

As Maggie followed her to the house, she paused beside the ringtail’s cage. The plump animal was still curled up asleep, his sides heaving with labored breaths. She closed her eyes and then looked again. One almost human arm was tucked around skinny knees, the other pillowed his cheek. His flesh was the silvery green of cholla cactus, and cactus spines circled his head. Pale rays of light streamed from his shoulders. They looked for all the world like wings.

• • •

Fox scraped the knife across the stone. He tested the blade. It was very sharp. Then he stripped the bark from the thin willow poles he had brought to the edge of Redwater Creek. He placed the poles into the ground, bending them into a circular shape; he lashed them together, using the long strips of bark and lengths of rough twine. When he was finished he had a low hut standing barely waist high, circular in shape. He covered this frame with a heavy green tarp, blocking out the afternoon sun.

When the inside of the round structure was completely sealed against the light, Fox raised a flap and went back out. The sun was riding lower on the distant hills, casting long, cool shadows. He dug a firepit and gathered deadfall, sycamore and cottonwood. Adding this to his pile of dry mesquite logs, he began to build the fire. Fox spoke to it softly as he did so, talking to the wood, to the smooth round stones placed inside the circle of the kindling and soon covered by the leaping flames.

As the fire grew, he stopped talking and he listened, the way Tomás had taught him. He heard only the crackle of the fire, the snap of the dry wood, the hiss of the green. The music of the water. The whisper of the wind. A single coyote in the hills. He frowned, knowing that if Tomás had been here, the other man would have heard more.

Fox knew that there were creatures in these mountains, even if he still couldn’t hear them speak. Spirits of the rocks, the trees, the water; they’d been his playmates as a child. He had lived out-of-doors so much back then he could have almost been a mountain spirit himself; but then he’d grown up, and gone down to the valley. He had not had such visitations since. It wasn’t until Tomás came to the upper cabin, with his drums, his songs, his spirit-fires, that Fox had begun to realize there was more to those old visions of his than a lonely child’s imagination, steeped in too much poetry.

He loved this desert. He wanted to know it, to See it with more than simple human sight. He knew that Tomás could teach him how. He had worked with the older man for several years, and still he could not hear the voices in the flame. He could not See as a child Sees. But he was a patient man. These things took time. And Fox had all the time in the world.

He sat beside the fire, waiting for the sun to set, the moon to appear. He placed his deerskin drum beside him, where the skin would tighten from the heat of the flames. Next to it was an Irish penny whistle, an Indian flute and a western one. He took a small pouch from the pocket of his jeans, and poured tobacco into his palm. He held it for a moment, then he gave it to the fire with a prayer for all of his ancestors … whoever they might have been.

Mr. Foxxe. María Rosa. He had no certain knowledge of their history. He could only guess by the lines of his face what lineage was in him: Anglo blood, by the color of his eyes; something else by the light brown color of his skin. Hispanic? Indian? Did it matter? He was of this land, whatever it had been. He was born here. Eaten its food, drunk its water, sweated under its hot, hot sun; he had taken the land into his body. His blood and bones were formed of it. He belonged here, as nowhere else.

Tonight he would ask the land for blessing, and protection, as he had that night six months before. He frowned, remembering his fire by Deer Springs on the night he’d come back to the mountains. He’d been traveling down in Mexico, and he’d felt such joy by the fire that night, to be back home in his Rincons again. But that was the night that Cooper was killed, as he’d discovered on the very next day. He’d been the one to find Cooper’s body, in a wash bed, miles from the canyon.

Fox added more wood to the fire, his heart heavy. The old man drove him crazy, but he missed him. If only he had thought to ask for Cooper’s protection that night by Deer Springs as well… But he hadn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. He wished he could know that for sure.

He had learned from this. Tonight he had come not to ask for the land’s protection for himself, but for the ones he loved