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

“How could I?” he said. “When you appeared on this mountain, when I was forty-two years old, you said that we’d never met in my lifetime. And so I dared not let you come.”

“Oh,” she said, startled laughter breaking from her. A broken piece of herself began to knit. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted her here. The look on his face was proof of that.

“If we only have a little time,” said Cooper, “then let us speak frankly. The Nightmage is still missing, I presume, and that’s why they have sent you here?”

“The Nightmage? Do you mean the stag man himself, or the painting of the stag man?”

“Both. For if the painting is found, surely the other will be found as well.”

“I know where the painting is,” she said carefully, without naming the place. “But that’s not why I’ve come. I don’t know why the painting is so important.”

“You don’t?” he said, puzzled. “Then why are you here? I thought they would have sent you on the path in order to search for it again. That’s why they come, when they come to me. Several times their Hounds have searched this house, but the scent of the stag eludes them. They don’t believe me when I tell them that I don’t have Anna’s painting, or know where it is.” He frowned. “Yet you say the painting has been found. Then why have they let you come here?”

She hesitated. She couldn’t begin to guess why Crow did anything he did. And she didn’t want to admit to him that she’d come to learn the reason for his death.

She looked away, and her eyes rested on the bulletin board above Cooper’s desk. The envelope was there, the letter to her, jutting out from the picture by Brian Froud.

Cooper followed Maggie’s gaze, and he paled. “You recognize that letter, don’t you? Then that means that I will fail.” He bowed his head. “I knew that was a risk. That’s why I was locking up the paintings, to keep them safe, just in case.”

“My reading that letter is inconclusive,” Maggie told the old man quickly, “for you still don’t know what circumstances I found it under. Perhaps it was after your death at the age of one hundred and three; I’m not going to say. Only now you must be certain to leave it there, for someday I must indeed read it.”

Color came back into the poet’s face again. “Yes, of course. Yes. Yes, I will.” He smiled. “My letter worked, then. It intrigued you enough to stay in the canyon. To meet them, and walk the path.”

“You and your damn riddles, Cooper,” she said with exasperation. “Why couldn’t you have written me something a bit clearer? Why can’t you even be clear with me now?”

He rubbed his face with one hand, looking every bit his age. “I’ve been around them too long.”

She sat down again, her knees close to his, and took his two thin hands in her own. “Tell me about the Nightmage,” she said. “Explain it to me. No riddles this time.”

“No riddles,” Cooper agreed. His hands were trembling. “I’m afraid I need a drink.”

“All right.” Maggie rose. “I’ll get it. I know where you keep it, after all.”

She came back with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two glasses. She poured, and handed one to Cooper.

“The Nightmage was Anna’s muse,” Cooper told her, his eyes narrowing with distaste for the creature. “He was the first of these fairies to—”

“Fairies?” Maggie interrupted him.

“I’m an Englishman, and my mother was a Celt. That’s what I’ve decided to call them. To Anna they were angels … until the end, when she thought them no better than the devil himself. What do you call them, Black Maggie?”

“I don’t know. Spirits of the mountain, of the land?”

“That will do. The names, like the shapes, are ones that they wear for us. They don’t much matter to them.”

Maggie thought of Thumper, joyfully chanting out her name. In this, at least, he was wrong.

“The Nightmage was the first of them for Anna,” he continued, “and he gave her the Sight to see the rest. Under his influence, Anna began to paint the paintings in this house. It is the best work she’s ever done; true work, and they all know it…”

Maggie didn’t know if he referred to the critics who ignored it, or to the creatures on the mountain.

“… But what she didn’t understand is that they have artists among them too. They call them mages. And for some of them, we are the materials they use. Our lives are their raw canvas; our emotions are the paints. We’re the clay: they push a little here, they prod a little there, till the work is done. If they drive a man or woman insane in the process, it matters little to them. They are amoral beings, Anna told me. They are neither good nor bad, Marguerita; those concepts mean nothing at all to them. The Nightmage was an artist, like Anna. And she was the work that he was creating. When she was strong in herself and in her art, the work they created of each other was good. But later, when Anna was frightened, and a bit unstable … then it all went wrong.”

“And the land mirrored Anna’s nightmares,” Maggie said, remembering the last letter to Maisie.

“That’s right. So she stopped it. She stopped him, and proved herself to be the stronger artist after all. Perhaps he didn’t know that she was granddaughter to a Mexican bruja, a witch woman. Anna bound her muse into a painting, into a shape where he could do her no harm. You’ve seen him, the white stag in the hills? She trapped him in that shape, that animal form, by putting the essence of him somewhere else. In the painting. And that’s why they want the painting back again so badly.” He gave Maggie a haunted look. “If I had it. I’d give it