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

He shook his head. “I don’t believe that. You don’t even believe it yourself. You might have been once. What are you now?”

She was growing irritated with Crow. “Once a poet, always a poet; it’s in the hardwiring, like breathing,” she said, aware that she was paraphrasing Lillian Alder and hoping that she did indeed believe it. “Look, I’ve answered your question, so I think you should answer mine.”

“Why should I?” he said smoothly. “You haven’t given me a true answer. Why should I give one to you?”

“Because I’ll give you something else back for it,” she offered. “I’ll give you one of my poems.”

He laughed at her. “What makes you think I want your poems? I’ve had Cooper’s. Why would I want yours? You’ll have to do better than that. Give me something else.”

“What do you want?”

He placed his hand over her heart and pushed her back against the stone. “I want your pulse, your breath, your voice. I want everything.”

She said, “No.”

He wrapped his other hand into her hair. “What makes you think I can’t just take it?”

“You can, but you won’t,” she told him, and she prayed that this was true.

“Oh no? And why not?”

“Dah-maz,” she said.

Crow smiled, a cold, inhuman smile that made her shiver under his gaze. Then he pressed his lips to the top of her head, almost tenderly. He let her go.

“Dammas,” he said, correcting her pronunciation. He narrowed his eyes. “When you can give me a true answer to my question, then come find me again.”

He stood. He flung himself into the air, changing form and taking flight. Maggie caught her breath as a huge black bird climbed the wind and soared into the darkening sky.

She found herself alone by the stream as the waxing moon rose over the hills. Maggie inched down from the ledge with effort, and started across Redwater Creek. A flat stone shifted underfoot and she scrambled for another stone; she was soaked to the shins, her boots leaking water, by the time she reached the other bank.

She shivered. As the sun disappeared, it took all the warmth of the desert with it. She should not have stayed outdoors this late without clothes warmer than one thin shirt. The night was closing in on her. The path was dark and difficult. She no longer heard a distant flute song; now it was the low beat of a drum.

She climbed with care over tumbled gold rock as she descended on the narrow path, passing by the trail that led to the Alders’ and continuing downhill along the creek. The creek broadened out, white sycamore trees and small cottonwoods hugging the rocky banks. The roots of the sycamores twined and knotted over stone, like the trees in Arthur Rackham paintings. Tall saguaro populated the hills on either side, watching her pass.

At a place where the land leveled out below, a bonfire blazed in a small clearing. The steady sound of a drum was louder now. It came from a low circular structure built beneath a sycamore’s crooked limbs. Maggie stepped into the light of the fire, drawn by the heat and the rhythm of the drum. As she sat, shivering, grateful for the warmth, she saw Fox’s flutes, his boots, and his silver Hopi bracelet lying on the ground.

Something that had been tense in her all day relaxed now. Fox was here. She’d been needing his solidity on this day when the ground underfoot kept shifting. And there was something more she needed, or wanted—perhaps it was just to talk to him, to see what shape Thumper and Crow and Pepe would take in his clear grey eyes. Fox was a man, Maggie reflected, who would know just what was at his core. Love for the desert, compassion for its creatures—that’s what she’d guess his essence would be; that and an ability to truly listen. Why had it taken her forty years to understand how valuable that was?

She fed more kindling into the fire. Overhead, the stars arced over a sky more vast than she’d ever known skies could be. She breathed in the desert, the smells of creosote, sage, dry sand, and burning mesquite. A dark shape crept out of the night. One-Eye, Pepe, in his four-footed form. In this shape, he was more coyote than human, creeping toward her with a wild creature’s wariness. Then he lay beside her, resting his chin on Maggie’s knees as she sat staring into the flames.

Much later, when the drumbeat stopped and the night was still but for the small bats overhead, Maggie fed the last piece of wood into the fire, feeling herself content, at peace, at rest, at home. It was an odd sensation. One-Eye slept; her leg was numb where the animal rested his heavy head. His tawny fur was soft beneath her hand, warm against her thigh.

The tarp was thrown back from the circular hut and Fox emerged, limned by firelight, on his knees on the cold, dry ground with clouds of steam billowing around him. As the smoke escaped into the night, it was lit by a silvery luminescence, and in the smoke, she could see pale figures crowding the doorway behind him. They seemed to be made of smoke and light, vaguely human in shape, but no more than that. They lifted into the clear night sky on wings trailing steam and spiraling stars. Then they faded, with the smoke, beyond human sight. Fox looked up at her with wonder.

“Did you see?” he asked. There were tears on his face, or perhaps just steam on his hot red cheeks. She looked at him, speechless, and inclined her head. Fox stood, and he came close to the fire. He wore only jeans; his chest was bare and his skin smoked where the gleam of sweat met the chill of the cold night air. He sat down beside her, smiling at the sight of the coyote asleep between them.

“You’re out of wood,” she said finally. The fire was