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

“What about Juan? Where is he now? Is he all right.’ ”

Crow cocked his head, as though he listened for something. He sniffed the air. And then he told her, “He is sitting on the banks of Redwater Creek. It is a wonder you didn’t trip over him as you came up the hill just now.”

“He’s all right then,” Maggie said with relief.

“He’s alive,” Crow amended. He yawned. “This begins to grow tedious.” He made a gesture and the fire, the scented smoke, all disappeared.

“No, wait,” Maggie said. “Tell me about Cooper. Tell me how Davis Cooper died.”

Crow got to his feet. “Ask Cooper,” he said. “I think you’ve asked enough questions now.”

“One more,” Maggie said, rather desperately. He paused, half-turned away from her, and she ran through all the questions that had been building up inside her these last several weeks. She grabbed one, almost at random, and said, “So what is the ‘spiral path’?”

“Ah,” he said, turning back again, “now you begin to interest me. Do you wish to walk the spiral path?”

“Perhaps,” she equivocated warily.

“Davis Cooper is there,” he told her.

That sounded rather sinister to her. “If death is the spiral path, then no thank you.”

He barked with laughter. “You need not die. The dead walk on the path, it’s true; but the place where they walk, no living man can reach.” He offered his hand to pull her to her feet. She took it, and rose. “Come, walk with me,” Crow said, and now his face was shaped as a man’s—beautiful, and lightly drawn with spiral tattoos across the cheeks. She was glad to see that face again. The fox face had been too unnerving. “Come, and I will show you the path. Then you can decide for yourself whether you wish to follow where it leads.”

He took her to the mountain’s edge. The city sprawled in the valley below, surrounded by mountains, half hidden by long plumes of clouds drifting past the ridge where they stood. Crow waved his hand and spoke a word in a strange tongue. The clouds moved with his movement, creating a straight and unnatural line that ran from the mountains on the northern horizon to the Santa Rita range in the south.

He said, “That’s the path that you humans walk, from the moment of birth until the moment of death. You think that every year, every step, is a progression from the one that fell before it to the one that follows after. You call it Time. It makes no sense to us.” He waved his hand and the line disappeared. The clouds broke up. He waved, spoke a word, and then he spun them into a perfect circle.

“This is also Time. It is the cycle of the seasons, the harvests, of a woman’s blood moon, of birth and death. The circle is a true shape; it has beauty in it. Yet it’s still a human Truth, not one of ours. It is not dammas,” he told her. He dismissed it, waving. The circle dispersed, the clouds scattering across the wide valley, casting patterns of shadows that drifted across the lower mountain slopes.

Crow spoke another word. He made a stirring motion, as though he stirred a great cauldron of soup. The clouds below them spun and roiled, then formed the shape of a white spiral that seemed to be made out of fine spun sugar. It covered the valley, blocking it from sight, and unlike the other cloud forms, it moved—a slow, barely perceptible movement, steady as the orbit of the earth.

“This is our path, the spiral path. This is how the world looks to us. We have no Time, as you know Time. We know only that-which-moves. On the spiral path, the past and the future are simply two different directions. I stand in the present, at the center of the spiral, and I can walk as easily to one as to the other.”

Maggie stared at the cloud form before her, shaped like the patterns on the bracelet she wore, like the spirals in Anna Naverra’s paintings. She tried to grasp what Crow was telling her; but it felt exactly like stepping off the side of the cliff. She shuddered. “Did Anna walk the spiral path?”

“She tried,” Crow said. “And she failed.”

Maggie looked at the white cloud shape before her, the great unknown spreading at her feet. She could understand why Anna had failed. It was not a human path at all; it was neither rational nor safe. It threatened her whole understanding of the world, and her place in that world, in Time, in history. It was beautiful and terrible. Maggie looked away, feeling dizzy.

“What about Cooper, then?” she questioned Crow. “Did he try to walk the path?”

“Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.” The smile Crow gave to her was sly. “If you really want to know, I suggest that you go and ask Cooper yourself.”

She stared at him. “I could do that?” she said, her husky voice breaking. “I could talk to Cooper?”

“Of course. On that path, you could walk into any of the years when Cooper was alive on this mountain.”

Maggie stood, overwhelmed, understanding the true seduction of what he offered. For all of the years of her adult life she had wanted to talk face-to-face with the man whose words had opened poetry to her, and unlocked the poet within herself. Fox, Dora, Tomás, the Alders—they had all had, all taken for granted, the very thing that she had been denied, and had thought she had lost forever. Crow smiled a small, self-satisfied smile, knowing that he had found the one desire buried in Maggie’s heart that would lead her to walk off a cliff.

Crow said, “One road lies to wickedness; one road lies to righteousness; and the third road—”

“—lies to fair Elfland, where thou and I must go,” said Maggie, finishing the line from an old folksong. She hesitated, remembered her promise to Fox, to be careful