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

silver-white, quite short, and raggedly cut. Tatiana had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis some years before; the illness had stolen the prettiness from her face, and given her back something more compelling. She was frowning now, looking up at Maggie with worry in her shadowed eyes. “You’ve been sighing all day,” she pointed out.

“It’s just the weather,” Maggie assured her. “The sky looks so small and closed-in here, after those big, blue desert skies.”

“Welcome to London.” Tat gave Maggie a wry look as she screwed the frame together. She used the screwdriver carefully, slowly. Such things gave her trouble now. “I, for one, am glad you made it back in time for the Private View of my show. Even if you don’t seem so certain that you want to be here yourself…”

“Of course I’m glad I’m here for your show,” Maggie said. And then she sighed again. “I just don’t know where I want to be after that. And that’s the problem.”

She got up and went into the bedroom that Tat had built at the end of the loft. She still wasn’t ready to talk to her friend about what exactly had happened in Arizona. She would—she didn’t keep secrets from Tat. But the words to explain it all hadn’t come yet. She felt empty of language, for once in her life. Empty of everything except confusion. She had run from the desert like she had run from everything that had ever sought to bind her. But she couldn’t seem to run far enough. It was all she could think about here.

She picked up her bag and sat on the futon mattress, emptying the bag beside her. She was getting good at doing things one-handed, but it would be a relief when the cast came off her arm and she could have her normal life back again. Whatever that was, she thought, and a sour look crossed over Maggie’s face. She wasn’t sure she knew anymore. She had thought coming back to safe, familiar ground would begin to make things clear again. She had thought she could find the shape of the woman she’d been, before she’d gone to Cooper’s mountain.

She looked at the objects spread on the quilt: a single white feather, a string of bells, chunks of raw turquoise, a silver Hopi bracelet. Cloth-wrapped bundles of cedar, sage, and tobacco. Cooper’s edition of The Wood Wife. She picked up the sage and inhaled it, breathing the scent of another world altogether, another life, another Maggie Black, another shape over the essence beneath. She didn’t know if it was a true shape, or if the land had overwhelmed her with one of its own. Perhaps in this place, where the land did not sing beneath her, she’d be able to tell. And when she finally knew the answer to that riddle, she’d write to Fox, as she had promised.

She picked up The Wood Wife and opened it. Several of Cooper’s letters and an old bill for his dry cleaning were stuck inside its pages. She opened one of the letters and read, “I’ll tell you, after arguing with Anna about coming to New York, I find I don’t want to be here after all… I want silence again, and vast blue skies. I want the heat, honest earth underfoot. I can’t sleep here. I don’t think I’ll sleep till I reach the mountains, and Anna.”

She read another. “… It is not possible, it is not conceivable that she will stay away for good. Anna loves these hills, this sky, this house. She’ll come back for the land, if not for me.”

And another. “I can’t bear to think of you in the flatlands, where the stones do not whisper your name.”

Maggie put the letters down. Here in the city, the stones below were mercifully silent. She could understand why there may have come a time when Anna Naverra needed that. She sat now and listened. Outside the bedroom door was a steady hammering, a muttered curse, and the music of the Desert Winds tape she’d brought to London for her friend, filling the loft with Indian flute and the whisper of another land. Beyond that was the sound of London traffic, someone shouting in an Asian tongue, trucks rattling over the cobbled stone of the alley below the warehouse windows: sounds less beautiful to her than the desert’s, but just as dear.

Maggie opened The Wood Wife, and she looked down at the ninth of Davis Cooper’s poems. She read:

The ghost comes from the wood holding

the future, not the past, a fragile gift

as weightless as the smoke

that rises where she steps…

She read it slowly, haltingly, as though translating from a foreign tongue. Her eyes skimmed down the rest of the page. She turned it, and she read:

… the night visitors, three women, three Fates,

three Graces, the ghosts who haunt me here;

the painter who stands behind me; and

the poet who stands before me; and

the wood wife, silent at my side,

rooting me to this earth…

She looked at the words. Type on a page. Runic shapes in black, black ink. Words were chunks of turquoise in her hand; words were what protected her. Only right now she couldn’t remember just what it was they protected her from.

She closed the book and swept the desert back into her leather bag. She went to the kitchen. She switched the electric kettle on, and spooned black tea into Tat’s china pot, thinking of another poem. This one was by Michael Hannon:

Work with words cannot save us.

Nothing can do that,

but perhaps to be saved is not salvation.

I see the trees along this road

turn into smoke at sundown,

and know them for the very ones

I was meant to see.

When the tea was made, she balanced a tray with her good arm and carried it over to Tat. Then she sat down on the floor beside her, resting her back against a flat-file painted the red of an ocotillo bloom.

“Girl,” said Tat, reaching for the cup, “do you want my opinion?”

Maggie