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

sky. The pages came down, falling as rain. Where they fell, tall cactus sprang up and took root: a forest of mature saguaro turned to silver by the light of the moon.

Maggie watched as the Woodmage turned in the direction of Red Springs Canyon, shaped as María Rosa now: a small, old woman in a shapeless dress, passing beneath the saguaro’s outstretched arms. It was then that coyotes began to gather, moving through cactus and creosote, called to the side of the dry wash bed by the echoing cries of their shape-shifting kin: Crow, in his swift coyote-shape; Angela and Isabella Foxxe; Pepe and his littermates—the seven Hernandez brothers. They sang for the passing of a Spiritmage, of the one who had stood watching over the east through the years when the Nightmage no longer could—although Davis Cooper had never even known that a mage was what he had become.

As she listened to the coyotes’ ghostly cries, Time and the rising wind moved faster, pulling, spinning Maggie into the stars that hung low over the desert. “Crow,” she called out, trying to picture the mountain, the cliff, his hand, his sly face. Where was he? Why did he not pull her back? What foolish bargain had Maggie made that would now prove to be her own undoing? She could hear the bells on her ankles jingle as Time dropped her into a funnel of stars, a bottomless well down which she was falling, and would fall forever, the past in her throat, the future in her teeth, the death song in her ears. The song of the coyotes … the song of the stars … the deep bass song of the mountains below…

She panicked, and flailed, looking for something solid to hang onto. Her hand met flesh, and she grabbed for it, falling heavily to the hard, unyielding ground. Pain exploded as her shins met rock, and the skin of her cheek scraped across loose stone. Arms closed around her. “Crow,” she gasped.

“Good god, Maggie,” Fox answered her.

“Don’t let me go,” she said to him.

“I won’t.” And he held her tight.

• • •

Crow lifted his head and sniffed the air. The wind carried the sound of bells. Black Maggie was now down by Redwater Creek; she’d returned from the path without his help, and of all the ways the woman had surprised him, this one surprised him the most.

Good. Crow liked surprises. It made the world a more interesting place. And the night promised many more to come; this night, of all the nights in the wheel of human Time: the 31st of October. Samhain. Cooper called it Allhallows’ Eve. The next morning, to Anna, was the Day of the Dead. Crow smiled a wolfish smile, anticipating the night ahead. It was the night that they rose from the earth, the trees, the water, the roots of the wood—rose and rode the Rincon hills, and marked the land as their own.

Crow climbed to his feet on the sharp rock ledge where he had been sitting the whole day long, waiting for Black Maggie to call to him from the silt of the past’s floodwaters. Many hours had passed while she was in that place—where Time moved faster, and slower, than here. Now the moon had risen. The Star Maker flung jewels across a black sky. Crow shaped himself into coyote form, sniffed the air, and followed Maggie’s trail. He leapt down the dark, steep mountain slopes to the canyon below, howling as he ran. All around him, his kin in the midnight hills lifted their voices in answer.

He found the woman at the edge of the creek in the place where the water formed deep bathing pools. He waited in the shadows, coyote ears cocked forward, and watched her curiously. How had she gotten back again? She was white as bone and breathing hard; her chest rose and fell beneath the spiral marks he had painted on her. Crow narrowed his eyes, watching Johnny Foxxe wash the blood from her cheek with a bright red cloth. The one called Dora stood nearby, her unbound hair the copper color of the moon. A black dog caught the scent of Crow and growled, his hackles rising.

“What is it, Bandido?” Dora said. “What is it you see out there, boy?”

As Dora peered into the darkness, Crow studied this second woman with interest. Her husband was the young painter that the Floodmage claimed as her masterpiece. The mage had made a Hunter of the man, and tonight he’d run with her spectral Hounds. If he survived that hunt, then he would win the skill with paint he’d bargained for. But the Hounds would hunt what they wished to hunt—perhaps the white stag, perhaps the man.

There were many in the shadows of the hills who wagered now on the outcome of that hunt: would the painter and the Hounds draw blood that night? Or would the poacher reach the white stag first, led to his prey by the Owl Boy, the Windmage, who had taunted him with it for months? Or perhaps the stag himself might prevail, as he had before, to run another year—wild, wily, beautiful, shedding turquoise stones across the mountain slopes.

Crow’s bet was on the stag. The beast was canny, quick, and powerful. Crow’s kind would not kill one such as that; no one of them would take down a creature in its prime. A bullet to the heart, a knife to the throat: a human hand must do that work. Crow wagered that the painter’s hand would falter. But the poacher was an unknown factor, and that made it more interesting to him.

Crow heard gunshot crack through the hills: two quick shots, in rapid succession. The Owl Boy’s pet must be close by. Crow sniffed the air with his pointed nose. There was no scent of magic or the stag. The man was hunting other game now. Practicing the art of death.

“It’s that poacher out there,” Black Maggie was saying to