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

she clung to the door, but it pulled her away. It flung her back into the night sky, away from the girl she’d once been.

Cooper, Maggie told herself, concentrate on Cooper and the mountain. Or she would drown in the past, the path like a flood of water, pushing her under. Concentrate. That light. The blue door. The black trees of the mesquite wood. She breathed in; she breathed out. The whispers, the chanting, they rose and they fell with the rhythm of her breath. She saw the blue door. She walked toward it, ignoring the grey-and-white images flickering past: her grandfather in that awful coat he loved and always used to wear; a sculptor walking the streets of Florence, looking like he’d lost something precious; Nigel, in a crowded room, his movements eloquent of great weariness… At the sound of her footsteps Nigel turned; she saw that his face was lined, his hair thinning, his blue eyes wide with fear or wonder… No, not that way; don’t get pulled into Nigel’s future. Think of Cooper, of walking to Cooper, and that light, that dusky, silver light…

She felt solid, sandy ground underfoot. The mountain smelled fresh, as it did after the rains. Dusk had fallen. A lantern was lit on the porch, where Davis Cooper sat. He stared, as though Maggie were a ghost, which she was, coming out of the wood.

She crossed beneath the Three Graces and stopped just short of the front porch steps. His eyes were wide. The clean lines of his face had started to weather into cragginess from the Arizona sun, alcohol, and grief. He might have been Maggie’s age, not much older, yet he put down his glass with a shaking hand, and his voice was the gruff voice of an old man. “Are you one of Anna’s, or are you one of mine?”

She swallowed. “I’m neither. I’m Marguerita Black, and I’m as human as you are, Cooper. I’ve come from … a long way away. Another point in time. On the spiral path.”

He took this information with equanimity. Maggie realized the man was very drunk. “Where are my manners?” Cooper said to her. “Sit down. Can I get you a cup of tea, or some gin?”

Maggie smiled, for Dora had been right—even on this mountain, he was still an Englishman. She shook her head. She could feel the spiral’s pull. “I don’t think I’ll be here long.”

“Why have you come then?” He sat very still, as if she might disappear if he moved.

She dropped her eyes, feeling suddenly shy of the stranger before her. “I came because you’ve been good to me. Will be good to me, years from now. And I never had the chance to meet you face-to-face while—” She stopped abruptly, but he finished the sentence for her.

“While I was alive?”

She nodded silently.

“How very interesting. You walked here on the spiral path. And you say that you are not a mage, a shape-shifter, or a witch?”

“I’m a poet,” she told him.

“Ah, now, that explains it,” Cooper said. She felt the ground shift underfoot.

“No, not yet,” she cried aloud, but the earth heaved, flinging her sideways, sending her rolling across the hard stones of the yard; the wind pulled at her, pulling her back to the roiling clouds and the stars.

Cooper, she chanted silently, over the song of the stars in her ears, Cooper, let me stay here with Cooper.

But the stars kept turning, the wind kept blowing; Time moved again, and the earth spun below. She stood at the center of the great spiral, the stars pulsing hot and cold around her, the lights of the valley spread beneath her, cradled by the dark mountain slopes. She thought about what Crow had told her: On the spiral path, the past and the future are simply two different directions. I stand in the present, and I can walk as easily to one as to the other of them.

The Cooper that Maggie needed to talk to was the man he had been these last twenty years, the man she had known, just before his death. She concentrated on that point in time, on a blue front door, more weathered now, and the old house as she knew it. She took a breath. Breathe in; breathe out. She breathed to the rhythm of the pulsing stars. She took several steps. She walked from here to there, and stood in the mesquite wood. She crossed over Cooper’s yard again, following the path she had taken before.

She saw lights inside, heard movement, and she went right in through the blue front door. Cooper was in the living room, taking paintings down from the adobe walls. He looked up in anger as Maggie walked in, then his face softened with his surprise.

“Marguerita,” he said, his voice as full of wonder as a child’s on Christmas morning.

“Cooper,” she said, feeling even more shy than last time, if that were possible—for this was a Cooper to whom she was real, and not just a ghost from the wood.

“You’ve come to me on the path again, after all these years,” the old man said.

“Yes.” She stood and just looked at him, the Cooper she’d wanted to see for so long, the face of the man who had been her mentor-—and more than that, her friend. Then she roused herself. “But I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay this time either.”

He frowned. “All right, then, my dear. Why don’t you come into my study? We’ll talk for as long as we can.”

Maggie followed him and was startled by the change in the room where the poet worked. The place was a flood of papers and books, dirty dishes, laundry, stale pipe smoke. Cooper sat down in the middle of the chaos, and pushed books off of another chair for her.

He reached out, gently touching her cheek. “It’s you, in the flesh. I’m not drunk, and you’re here.”

“Goddamn it, Cooper,” Maggie said to him, “I would have come