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

for that; she was too aware of him now for ease, too conscious of his presence at her side. He also seemed nervous. Perhaps he could tell what she’d been thinking about him. Perhaps she had ruined their friendship now, and just when it had come to matter to her. As they left the wood and crossed the yard, Maggie silently cursed herself; she should have kept that vow she’d made to Tat about men, and stayed away from Johnny Foxxe.

They reached the house, passing beneath the raised arms of the Three Graces. She climbed onto the porch and turned to Fox. “See?” she said. “No bogeys in the dark. Not even little Thumper tonight.”

“How do you know?” he asked her curiously.

“The door’s still shut and locked for once,” she told him as she fished out her key and flipped the deadbolt open.

“Well, goodnight, then.” Fox hesitated.

She waited. He stood frowning at the door, as though something about it disturbed him.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“Well—,” he said. He looked at his boots, and then looked up. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a cup of tea?”

She looked at him, startled. “You really want some tea?”

“No,” Fox said, with a sheepish look. “I want an excuse not to go home.”

She stared at him. Their eyes were on a level. She stepped closer to him, shivering. “Don’t go home, Fox. And don’t suggest sleeping on the goddamn sofa either.”

As Fox put his arms around her, he said, “I think I can manage to promise that.”

He smelled of fire, of mesquite smoke; he tasted of clear, sweet creek water; the touch of his skin was as hot as the desert sun as he gathered her close.

• • •

Crow stopped on the trail to Rincon Peak, closed his eyes, and shifted shape. He was human now, but he no longer wore the face Maggie Black had found so compelling, or Anna Naverra before her. Now his face was thinner, longer, the tattoo markings more pronounced. He was half-ugly and half-beautiful, mirroring the duality at his core.

He looked down the trail the way he had come, annoyed by points of light far below. At the midnight hour, the land should be still but for the movement of the night creatures, the owls, the bats, the mountain lions, and the smaller creatures that they hunted in the shadows of the waxing moon. But here were humans spread across the hill, searching the mountain for one of their own kind. If he cared to do so, Crow could tell them that the hiker they sought, a college student, lay at the bottom of a small ravine, thirsty, delirious, swollen and dreaming a rattlesnake’s poisonous dreams. He would probably die before the searchers found him. This meant nothing at all to Crow. The boy would survive; or the boy would die, gifting the carrion eaters with life. Either way, it was dammas, that-which-moved. Crow continued to climb.

When he reached the peak, he sat cross-legged in the dirt. The mountains spread below him, as far as human eyes could see, and farther, to the edges of the world. He sat and he waited. He did not wait long. The others came, as come they must. The calendar drew them—toward the one night in all human Time that belonged to them.

He shifted into another of his many Trickster shapes: his Laughing Coyote shape now, wearing a coyote’s tawny head on the lean, brown body of a man. Bells were tied around his shins; he held seed rattles in his lap. He’d play the clown, the fool, tonight. He did not belong in their mage-circle. They would tolerate his presence here, for Tricksters were outside the rules, outside all of the things that bind, and thus both above and beneath them. Crow’s coyote mouth gaped in a smile, the pink tongue hanging to one side, as they gathered on the mountaintop. Amused, he watched them come:

The Windmage arrived from the sky, trailing storm clouds in his wake. The boy settled on a perch of stone, his owl wings lightly fanning the air, his face masked by white feathers.

The Floodmage arrived from the south and sat down at the Owl Boy’s feet. The Drowned Girl wore a thin, wet dress, her bright hair knotted up with weeds. Beads of moisture seeped from her white skin and puddled on the ground.

The Rootmage arrived from below and stood, patient, immovable. A plump creature with a wrinkled green face, eyes like pebbles and a toothless smile, she had hag-stones hanging from the rags of her clothes and a white stone strapped onto her back.

The Woodmage arrived from the west, wearing a mask of white sycamore bark. Her cloak was stitched from the small brown leaves of acacia, ironwood and mesquite; the long, twiggy sticks of her hair rattled lightly in the wind, and her dry limbs creaked.

The Stonemage dreamed this gathering from his rocky bed in the mountains to the north. He was the One-Who-Sleeps, a mage of granite, volcanic ash and quartz. When he turned in his sleep, rock slides filled the canyons; if he woke, the mountains would fall.

It took six mages to form the circle: earth, sky, the four directions. Within that circle was the spirit, the mystery, the wild beauty of the land it enclosed. But the Nightmage, of the eastern hills, was missing from his midnight haunts—missing now for many years, as humans reckoned Time. A seventh mage had replaced the missing one, to keep the circle whole: a Spiritmage. A human mage. And now that seventh mage was missing too—or not missing, precisely, for they knew exactly where he was. He was dead. The earth cradled his bones. His spirit was beyond the spiral path.

The Floodmage stood. She was the Dark Hunter who wore the shape of a pale young girl. This paradox was pleasing to Crow, and he listened closely as she spoke. “Tomorrow I shall loose my Hounds again and they shall hunt. Do any here dispute