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

“There are turquoise beads on my choker,” Dora answered.

“I’m not wearing any,” said Fox. “Does it matter?”

“They say turquoise is for protection. Even Tomás told me that.” Maggie handed him a small turquoise stud. “If you wear this earring, I’ll wear the other one. Maybe it won’t do anything at all … but you never know, do you?”

Fox took the stud from her hand, and replaced his gold earring with it. “Look out,” he teased her, repeating her own words to her, “you might not get it back.”

Maggie smiled, meeting his warm grey eyes. “I can live with that.”

While Fox climbed the hill to look for Tomás, she followed Dora over to her house, standing in the doorway as Dora fetched her hiking boots. Maggie gazed around the big room with surprise. It was remarkably neat and tidy now. But all the long walls were bare.

They left the house with Bandido between them, catching up with Fox by Coyote Creek. Tomás Yazzie was with him, and Maggie gave the mechanic a timid smile. There was something about the older man’s quiet self-assurance that always made her feel a bit shy. His fierce, broad face turned gentle when he answered her smile with a smile of his own. He had a blue bandana tied around his brow, and his black hair hung in two long braids. He reached out and touched the copper band on Maggie’s wrist. She saw that he wore one too.

“This is Anna Naverra’s,” Maggie explained to him.

He nodded. “May I see it?”

She took it off and gave it to him. He looked at it closely. “Yes, they are the same.”

“Can I ask where you got yours?” she said as he handed Anna’s back to her.

“From my spirit-brother,” he answered her, but he volunteered no more than that.

At the Alders’ ranch, Lillian and John were waiting for them anxiously; and as Fox had predicted, their reaction to the news of Juan’s disappearance was to insist on calling Search and Rescue.

“Juan may have hitched a ride down the mountain,” Fox extemporized, his eyes flickering to Maggie’s. “Maybe he just needed to get away for a while, and he’s down the valley with a friend. Let’s not put the alarm out until we know that there’s a reason to be alarmed.”

John fetched his pack. “All right,” he said dubiously, “we’ll begin the search ourselves—I appreciate that it’s a delicate situation, and you want to keep it in the family. But if he’s not been heard from by tonight, then I’m going to let the sheriff know.”

Maggie watched Dora carefully as the six of them left the Big House together, heading down the long drive again and into the Rincon hills. Dora’s mouth was set in a thin white line, her face was bloodless, her shoulders tensed, and Maggie prayed that they’d find Juan on the mountain long before nightfall. They stopped at the Red Springs trailhead, and agreed to split the group into three. John and Lillian hiked to the north, on the ridge that ran above Coyote Creek. Dora wanted Fox as her partner—his presence seemed to give her strength. The two headed south on the lower path, Bandido following behind them. Maggie and Tomás took the Red Springs trail, running east along Redwater Creek. They would cover familiar ground until the Springs, and then Tomás would lead the way as they climbed higher, farther back into the wilds of the mountain.

As they started up the path, he touched Maggie’s arm and stopped her, pointing to the left. Behind a stand of paloverde trees, a white Ford truck had been parked off of the road. “I know that truck,” she said to him.

“The poacher,” Tomás guessed accurately. “John told me you had a run-in with him.”

“He’s after the coyotes.”

“No, he’s after the deer. He’ll shoot coyotes if he’s a mind to, but it’s that white stag he’s after.”

“How do you know that?”

The older man shrugged. “I’ve talked to the stones, the wind. They know. That big white buck’s a rare prize.”

Maggie frowned. “Should we go back and call the sheriff’s office? They’re supposed to be looking for him.”

Tomás shook his head. “The poacher can wait. The stag never shows himself before sundown. He’s quick, he’s smart, and he’s no fool. He’s more than a match for that one. Right now, we need to find Dora’s husband.”

“All right, let’s go,” said Maggie. She muttered under her breath, “Damn hunters.”

“I hunt,” said Tomás, in a soft, almost conversational tone, as if he’d said: The sun is hot. Then he added, in the same uninflected voice, “But I wouldn’t hunt that big white buck. I look for the lame, the weak; I hunt as coyotes hunt. For food, and not for sport.”

“We’re not coyotes. We can get our food from farms and grocery stores,” she said flatly.

“From farms? From factories, that’s where it comes from. Tell me why such a death is better than a clean kill, with respect and prayers?”

“Why kill at all?” she challenged him back.

He turned his stern, chiselled face to her. “Life feeds on life. We are part of that circle. Two-legged, four-legged, the green nation of the trees and plants; it is all the same.”

Then he was silent, his face expressionless, as they followed the winding trail through the tall saguaro, the creosote scrub, spiney green cholla and thorny sticks of ocotillo. The mountains embraced them, the Rincons to the east folding into the rugged Catalinas to the north. The sun beat down. Maggie angled her hat to shade her eyes from its fierce white glare. A jackrabbit darted across the path. Maggie called to it. It ignored her. It was browner, larger, than Thumper had been, and probably just a jackrabbit after all. But Maggie thought about Thumper, and Crow, hoping that thought, desire, expectation, might draw her closer to them.

They followed the creek to the circle of stone and white sycamore that surrounded Red Springs. It was empty, as