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

Tomás had predicted. Maggie hoped that it would stay empty, that the big white buck would not appear—not as long as the poacher was out today, wandering the beautiful Rincon hills with the ugly weapon he carried. They sat by the springs to catch their breath, refilling their bottles with clear, fresh water. Maggie thought that no other water had ever tasted so good and so sweet.

“Tell me about this buck,” she said to Tomás. His silence made her nervous. “How long has it been coming around here?”

“There’s been a white stag in these hills,” he said, “for nearly fifty years, according to Cooper.”

“But not the same one,” said Maggie. “That would be impossible.”

Tomás’s lips quirked in a smile. “Black Maggie, you’re still talking about what is possible and impossible, even now?”

She shivered. “Why did you call me that?”

“That’s what the stones and the wind call you.”

“You’ve heard the stones and the wind speak my name? Are you one of them too? Like Crow and the others?”

He laughed; he seemed to find this hilarious. “No,” he said finally, “I’m just a man. And I’m partial to this old shape I wear.”

She refused to let herself feel embarrassed. It had been a reasonable question. She asked him another. “What about this stag, then? He’s fifty years old, he sheds turquoise stones where he walks. He’s surely of their world, not ours.”

“Their world is our world,” Tomás told her. “They’re born of this earth, and so are we.”

“The stag,” she persisted, “is it a shape-shifter like Crow? Or maybe a mage?” she added, trying out the word.

He laughed again. She wasn’t quite sure why Tomás found her so amusing. “You’re like Fox. You want some Big Wise Man to come along and give you all the answers. What makes you think that I know more than you? Or that my answers will be the same as yours? You tell me, what do you know about this stag, Black Maggie?”

She considered the question. “I know that there’s a stag man in the hills. Anna called him the Nightmage, the ‘guardian of the east’—which I assume is here in the Rincons. You have a drawing of the creature. Juan has made a sculpture of him, and that sculpture feels … true to me. There must be a painting of him as well, but no one knows where that is now… No wait, I think I do know where it is. In her journal, Anna called the stag man her muse. And she once sent a painting that she said was of her muse to a woman named Maisie Tippetts, in New York. It was the last painting she ever painted, and she told Maisie not to let it ever come back to the mountains again.”

Tomás was staring at her, his eyes intent. “You see, you do know more than I do. Even Cooper didn’t know where that painting was. Cooper died still wondering.”

“Is it important?”

“Yes,” Tomás said simply. He did not offer to tell her why. He looked at Maggie sternly, or perhaps his fierce brown face made it seem that way. “If you make a gift of that information again, make sure it is to someone you trust.”

She nodded. “Like I did this time,” she said.

He gave her that wonderful smile of his. He stood. Then he turned to her suddenly. “You’ve given me a gift of information. I should give you a gift as well, and so I’ll tell you that it’s not just the painting of the Nightmage that is missing. It’s the mage himself, the guardian of this place. The stones, the fire, the water—I’ve heard them calling him. And no one answers.”

“How long has he been missing?” Maggie asked.

“I don’t know,” said Tomás as he started up the trail. “It’s difficult to tell. Time works differently for them—and for us, when we’re around them.”

As she followed behind him, climbing up the steep path that led to the next rocky ridge, she said, “May I ask you one more question?” He did not answer yes or no, so Maggie pressed on. “Have you told me this because it is dammas to give something back again?”

“Dammas? What is that?” the older man said, pronouncing it correctly.

“Beauty, motion, that-which-moves.”

“Ah. That’s what my Dineh relatives would call hohzo: walking in beauty. That is how a man should live his life. If he doesn’t, he sickens and dies.” He reached down, offering his hand to pull her up over the lip of the ridge. “Dammas,” he mused, pondering the word as they continued down the trail together.

At the foot of the next ridge, the path grew narrower and Tomás took the lead once more. The trail was even steeper here, and they needed both hands and feet to climb. She moved warily over the rock, avoiding cactus spines, loose stones, the shadows where snakes or scorpions might hide. Tomás soon outdistanced her, although even he was working at the climb. The sun was fierce. Maggie stopped once again and gulped down more spring water.

She was breathing hard by the time she reached the edge of the ridge above her. Here the land leveled out into a broad saddle that was filled with tall old saguaro and boulders twice her height. Tomás was somewhere far ahead; Maggie couldn’t see him on the trail. She continued on, feeling light-headed up here. The sky was close, and very blue. The rocks were golden, capturing the light, and she could almost hear them speaking to her, a low sound, a sigh, a murmuring. She began to understand what Tomás meant; there were words in the rocks underfoot and the wind overhead—where had she heard them before? She had a half-memory of a dream she’d dreamt last night, and then that memory was gone. But the words remained. They were poetry, filling her like the thin mountain air she gulped down, trying to catch her breath.

Overhead, a bird called raucously. It was huge and black, circling the cliffs. It