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

now? After tomorrow night, all this will change, and Anna will exhibit them herself.” He raised his glass. “Come now, let’s drink a toast to you, Black Maggie. And to poetry. If we meet again, it will be in your future, not in mine.”

“That sounds like a farewell. I’m not going yet.”

“I think you are. I can see the desk right through your hand, my dear. Tell me something, quick, before you go. Do you like the ninth of the ‘Wood Wife’ poems?”

“I like all your poems, Cooper, you know that.”

“But that one, Marguerita—what about that one?”

The floor slipped sideways, the stars swirled around her shoulders, and she could not answer him. Time was pulling at her again. She was not One of Them, she could not ignore it. Time, to her, moved in only one way—to stay in this place was to swim against floodwater running in the opposite direction. Her strength was ebbing, but still she swam, hanging onto that place, that time, trying to find a solid foothold that would keep her there, if only long enough to say good-bye.

She found it, climbing with great effort from the stream of Time to the banks of a wash. The wash was dry, the sand turned to silver by the light of the round moon overhead. She was in the desert, her desert. But the place was not familiar to her. She stumbled up the wash, heading east, judging by the shapes of the Rincons’ dark slopes. She stopped abruptly. There was a body there—a dead man lying face down in the dirt. She did not need to roll the body over to know it was Davis Cooper.

She looked down at him, her eyes burning and yet dry, as terribly dry as the land. She heard the sound of coyotes calling, grieving—there must have been hundreds of them. Then she felt the pull, and she gave in to it, grateful to let it spin her away from that night, that wash, leaving a single set of footprints behind her in the sand.

As she gave up her resistance to it, the pull of the path seemed to lessen. The moonlit desert stretched below her as she stood in the very center of the spiral. The mountains surrounded her, spreading out to the edges of the earth. She could see with a sight that was not human sight. She could see Johnny Foxxe build a willow lodge by Deer Head Springs, and a fire that would not speak. Above him, in the trees, a white owl hovered who was not a white owl but a mage. She could see a fire in Red Springs Canyon, and Tomás Yazzie’s stern face by its light. These flames murmured softly, and the man gifted them with tobacco, listening with rapt attention.

She could see the Alders, nursing three tiny fox pups who would not make it through the night. She could see the ghostly stag by Red Springs, glowing like candle flame in the dark. She could see Juan del Rio, marked with paint, marked as Tough he were One of Them, waiting in vain for the beautiful mage who had deserted him by Redwater Creek.

And she could see that mage, the Drowned Girl, standing in a dry wash bed running south of the canyon. Cooper was with her. He had brought the package of poems. The Floodmage looked at him with cold, black eyes. She had painted his flesh with red spiral marks. Now she pointed a finger and spoke a word, and the wash bed slowly twisted. It sparkled like coins in the light of the moon, and Cooper put one foot upon the spiral.

“Imagine this place, these hills, this land, in that moment in Time where you wish to be,” the girl whispered in the old man’s ear. “I’ll take you there. I’ll hang onto your hand. It’s as easy as stepping from one stone to another.”

She smiled an innocent, young girl’s smile. Cooper stepped upon the path. He stepped through Time. Maggie could see it swirl and turn around him, she could hear the song of the stars and the flood as he stepped on the path, stepped into the past, stepped into 1948 … into the deadly embrace of the water that had flooded the wash bed back then.

The Floodmage was as good as her word. She didn’t let go of the old man’s hand. She was still holding tight when she stepped back through Time to return to the dry riverbed.

“You see, Cooper,” she said, amused, as she picked up the package he’d left in the sand, “I took you there. I didn’t let go. I kept my side of the bargain.”

But now another being stood on the banks of the wash, looking down on the translucent girl. She was a woman in a carved wooden mask, wearing only a cloak made of dried brown leaves. Beneath the cloak, her skin was tattooed with lines like the grain of polished oak. When she spoke, her voice was soft as the whisper of wind in a mesquite grove. “And what will you give to me, water witch, for taking my man away from me?”

“Your freedom, wood wife,” said the girl. “You’ve been with humankind too long. You are as One of Them and not One of Us. Now his poems will bind you no more.”

“It was never a poem that bound me,” said the other, her voice low and fierce.

“What do you want then?” the girl said lightly.

“Give me his poems,” said the masked woman.

“Take them.” The girl crossed the wash and climbed the bank, her white feet leaving no tracks. She handed the package to the woman, bowed, and then faded like mist on the stones. She sunk back into the cracks of the land, to the water coursing far underground.

The Woodmage tore the brown paper wrapping, and uncovered the precious pages within. She held them to her breast for a long, silent moment—then she threw them into the