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

swooped down on her like a hawk on its prey. Maggie flinched and the bird’s raucous cry turned to laughter. Crow was standing before her.

She looked behind him for Tomás. The trail was empty. “Oh, he’s not here,” said Crow. “I’ve led him astray on an animal path. Now why do you look alarmed? I thought you wanted me to come? Oh dear, you’ve hurt my feelings now,” the shape-shifter told her, laughing at her.

Maggie laughed suddenly herself. She said, “You have no feelings, Crow.”

“None that you would recognize as such,” Crow agreed. He climbed a pillar of rock, and when he perched there looking down on her, it was the face of a grey desert fox he wore over the muscular figure of a man. He was singing to her, his voice lower and raspier in his throat: “Sun and dark she followed him, his teeth so bright did shine—and he led her over the mountains, that sly bold Reynardine…”

“Reynardine, the were-fox,” Maggie said.

“Very good,” Crow growled at her, gaping his mouth of canine teeth in something that might have passed for a smile. “You remember your English folklore.”

“Yes, I do. But why do you? We’re an ocean away from England.”

“True fact,” he said. “Why do you think?”

She frowned. “You’re taking things from my head.”

“Wrong. I took that one from Cooper’s, so don’t give yourself airs, my dear. Have you come to answer my question again?”

“Well now, can’t you just take the answer from my head?”

He growled, a low rumble in his throat. “I want you to give it to me.”

She looked up at him, squinting against the sun, and said with exasperation, “I’ve only got the answer you’ve already dismissed. At the core, I still feel like a poet—that’s just how the world looks to me. I’ve tried to think of something else clever to tell you, but I haven’t come up with anything.”

He cocked his head and looked at her. “I accept that answer,” he growled. He snapped his jaws as if he had gobbled it up, and licked his chops.

Maggie glared at him. “Why will you accept it now? Why wouldn’t you accept it before?”

He shrugged. “It’s true now. It wasn’t true yesterday.” He scrambled halfway down the rock and peered at her with interest. “What’s changed? What’s different about you today?” He sniffed her with his pointed canine nose. Maggie pushed the nose away. “Besides, of course, the fact that you have lost your maidenly virtue.”

“I lost my maidenly virtue over twenty years ago,” she snapped. “And I’m not here to discuss my sex life. If you’ve accepted my answer now, then you owe me some answers yourself.”

He slid off the rock and stood beside her, his arm around her shoulders. He smelled wild—musky and rank; and Maggie tried not to inhale. “I want to know what’s different now,” he persisted. “Then you can ask me all your little questions.”

“I don’t know what’s different. But last night, today, I hear language in the stones below. I find that I want to write poems again,” she said, and realized that this was true. “I can feel them bubbling up in me. I’ve not felt that way in years.”

He sniffed her again, closely, intimately, making her cheeks flush red with heat. He narrowed his foxy eyes at her. “I’ll be careful of you from now on.”

He dropped to the dirt, and sat there, cross-legged. She sat down and faced him, crossed-legged as well. A small fire burned between them, with no source of fuel that Maggie could see. She took the knapsack off of her shoulder, and pulled out two small bundles of cloth. She unwrapped them. Inside one was cedar and sage; the other contained tobacco. Fox had given them to her, and now she was glad that he had.

Crow watched, slit-eyed, as Maggie poured a small palmful of tobacco into the fire. A flat stone rolled out of the flames toward her. The stone was glowing red with heat. She covered it with cedar and dried white sage; their smoke and scent billowed into the air. In the smoke, she could almost make out the pale forms of the creatures in the fire last night.

Crow sat and watched her, silent for once, an expression of interest on his pointed face.

“How many questions may I ask?”

Crow said, “I have promised you only one. After that, as long as you amuse me, I will answer. When you stop amusing me, I shall go away.”

“All right, but the one you’ve promised me I already know the answer to. I know who you are.”

“Today I’ll stew and then I’ll bake, tomorrow I shall the Queen’s child take: Ah! how famous is the game; there’s nobody here who knows my name…”

“It’s not Rumpiestiltskin. You are a creature of this land, a Trickster and a shape-shifter. When I met you, you were wearing a shape that Anna Naverra gave to you.”

Crow inclined his head in assent. His eyes were very wide and dark, reflecting the flames of the fire.

“I also believe that you are Mr. Foxxe, and that you fathered Angela and Isabella, but not Johnny. Am I right about that?”

“Wrong,” he said with evident satisfaction.

“Wrong about it all? Or wrong in part?”

“There is no Mr. Foxxe. Angela and Isabella have no father but the sky, no mother but the earth.”

“Then where did they get the shapes they wear? From Anna? From Cooper?”

“Wrong and wrong again! Their shapes come from a painter from New York City, a children’s book illustrator. He came to the desert on vacation and he hiked into the canyon to sketch. One of his drawings was a true drawing. He never knew what he’d left behind.”

“But Johnny Foxxe is different. He’s human,” she persisted.

“As you are in a position to know,” he said lewdly.

She ignored this. “Then who is his father? Cooper?”

“Ask his mother,” said Crow, and he laughed.

“All right,” Maggie said, “I will do that. Maybe she’ll even answer.”

Crow narrowed his eyes. “If you can do