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

in this place: for his sisters, his mother, the Alders and del Rios. For Tomás, and the wild ones in the hills. And most of all, for Maggie Black.

While Fox waited for the sun to set, he picked up the flute of copal wood. The courting flute. He blew a soft note on it and adjusted the slide. Then he sat and he played, for the spirits of the hills, and for Maggie, wherever she was tonight: a Navajo song, an Irish song, a Spanish song, and a song of his own. He gave his music to the wind, the water, the stones, the yellow and crimson flames. Soon he would give them tobacco smoke, cedar, sage and sweat as well. And then he would ask what he’d come to ask. He’d speak, and then he would listen. And this time, if he listened hard, he might finally hear an answering voice.

• • •

The sun was sinking in the hills by the time the men from the sheriff’s office left. Maggie declined Lillian’s offer of supper; she’d spent half the day at the Alders’ already. Maybe Fox would be home by the time she got back, although he still wasn’t answering his phone. She said good night to Lillian and John, and hiked down the driveway to the road. The track joined the road at the posted entrance to the Red Springs trail-head. Maggie hesitated, and then she turned onto the trail instead of heading home.

The evening air was crisp and dry. The light was tinged with violet and the saguaro cactus cast long purple shadows across the winding trail. The pathway led through staghorn cholla, teddy-bear cholla and prickly pear. She could hear the sound of the creek in the distance. A coyote loped across the hill. It was not an animal she recognized, but she said, “Tell Crow I’m looking for him,” as he dashed through the brush toward Redwater Creek, his white, bushy tail held high.

She continued on until she reached the creek at a place where it formed deep bathing pools. The trail merged with the path that climbed the hill along the water’s edge. The path led to Red Springs in one direction, to the Foxxe sisters’ house in the other. Perhaps the white stag was at the springs tonight, Maggie thought as she chose the uphill path. And perhaps he wasn’t a stag at all, but another shape-shifter like Crow.

Maggie found herself looking twice at every bird, every lizard, every rock and creosote bush, wondering which was real and which was … what? Unreal? Or surreal, as Anna Naverra would say? It was all real. It was the magic, the pulse, the heartbeat at the center of the world. She wanted to know it better. She wanted to learn the secrets of the desert, Cooper’s ‘language of the earth.’ If she listened hard she could almost hear it, a thread of flute song above the wind.

And when you learn its language, what then? said a dry voice in her head, a Cooper voice. Well then, maybe she’d start writing poems again, Maggie told it. Not like Cooper’s poems, of course. Her own poems, her own exploration of the desert. She frowned. But how could she render this place better than Cooper, or even half as well? Those old doubts rose to the surface again, the ones that always chased her away from making poems. Journalism was easier—if only because she didn’t care so much.

“So,” came the sound of a voice, amused, “you have decided you can answer my question after all.”

Above her, Crow was sitting on a ledge of stone jutting over the creek’s other bank. He wore only his copper bands, and the feathers braided into his black hair. His body was marked with spiral tattoos, as it had been in her dreams.

“What question is that?” Maggie tilted her head back to look up at the shape-shifter. The dying sun turned his skin to gold and she shaded her eyes from the light.

He said, like a teacher repeating a lesson, “You have asked me twice, now, who I am. I told you that you could ask me a third time only if you could answer that same question. And now you’ve come to look for me. Have you discovered the answer then?”

“I’ve always known the answer,” Maggie said. She crossed the creek, leaping from stone to stone, clambering across a sycamore’s root. “Give me a hand. Help me up there.”

Crow grasped her wrist and pulled her up. She sat on the rock ledge next to him, dangling her boot heels over the side. The water flowed swiftly below, carving waterfalls from the smooth white stone. She could barely hear the music of the flute above the water’s song.

Crow grinned at her, and she wondered why she never noticed before that his teeth were so sharp, canine and predatory. Grandmother, what big teeth you have… The better to gobble you up.

“Then tell me who you are,” Crow said, “and why you have come to this land of mine.”

“That’s two questions,” Maggie pointed out.

He ignored this. “Quick now. Who are you?”

Maggie shrugged. “I’m many different people,” she said. “So I guess I’m a bit of a shape-shifter too. In West Virginia, I’m Emil Black’s granddaughter. In L.A., I’m Nigel Vanderlin’s ex-wife; in London, I’m Tatiana Ludvik’s crazy friend. I’m a vagabond writer to my friends in Holland; a sweet summer affair to a sculptor in Florence; a hopeless klutz to every gym teacher I’ve ever had—do you want me to go on?”

“Those are just the shapes. What’s underneath? The essence, that doesn’t change from shape to shape. That’s what a shapeshifter has to know, or you lose yourself. You can’t get back. You’re trapped in one shape, and you can’t get out.”

She frowned, thinking about this.

“What are you at the core, Black Maggie?” He smiled viciously. “I don’t believe you know.”

She said, hesitantly, “At the core, at the very center, I think I’m still a