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

confused as when she left. She stepped outside, her heart heavy, her fleeting connection to the desert soon washed away by the cold London rain.

She purchased curries, rice and naan and hurried back through the flooded streets. By the time she reached the door that led to the gallery on the floor above, she was thoroughly drenched. There was water in her boots. Her hair dripped rainwater down her neck. She had spent so much time in the other gallery that Tat’s Private View had already begun. Maggie sidled into the artsy crowd, embarrassed, feeling like a drowned rat.

She handed the sodden bag to Tat. “Dinner,” she said with an apologetic smile.

“Put it in back. We’ll eat it later. Go towel off in the loo or something.”

Maggie did as she was told, grimacing at her bedraggled reflection in the bathroom mirror. She dried her face and slicked back her wet hair before returning to the crowd.

A blues trio played in one corner: a tiny, wrinkled black man on guitar, an Irish woman she knew on bass, and long, lean Larry Bone, Tat’s other lover, on harmonica. Tat was on the other side of the room, talking with a man Maggie recognized as a journalist who worked for Time Out. Yann was cornered by a woman in spandex and spike heels, looking rather alarmed.

The gallery owner was fluttering around the room. He’d make few sales tonight. There were too many other artists here, with barely a quid between them. They’d come for Tat, and the free champagne; the art itself was mostly ignored. Maggie gazed around the room, nodding at old friends and pleased by the good turn-out. Then she saw another face she recognized. Standing over by the windows.

She stared at him. Then she crossed the room, oblivious to the greetings that followed her. When she stood before Fox, she just looked at him. She was silent. She had no words at all. She wondered how he had found her.

He held up the invitation to Tat’s show. “This was on your refrigerator,” he said to her with a sheepish grin. Then he looked at her warily. “I’m not like Nigel. If you don’t want me here, I won’t bother you again. It’s just …”

His voice trailed off, and she continued to look at him silently.

“It’s just,” he said, “that you once told me that if I wanted something, I should go after it. And you were right. That’s why I’m here.”

He watched her with that wary expression.

“Say something. What do you reckon, Maggie? Do you want me to go away again?”

Maggie swallowed. She took hold of Fox’s hand, feeling the warmth and strength of it. He carried the scent of the desert with him, in his clothes, in his hair, in the wind of his breath. But words had utterly deserted her. His question had too many others crowded beneath. One thing at a time, she told herself. She swallowed again, raised her eyes to his. One thing at a time, one step at a time; everything changed, it was all dammas.

“What I reckon,” she said, reaching for the only words she could seem to find right now, “is that when I go home to the mountain, I’m going to have to get me a truck.”

“Home?” Fox smiled, relief in his eyes. “You know, I think that’s the word I came across an entire ocean to hear.”

She gripped his hand, feeling confusion and indecision draining away. Drying up like water in the hot desert sun that he carried. Language was slowly returning to her, a foreign tongue that she remembered after all.

She said, “There’s something I’d like to do here. Before heading back to Tucson again.” She looked up at him, at the question in his eyes. “I’d like to take you out to Dartmoor. Where Cooper was born. Where I went to school. I’d like to show you my Wood Wife. The English one. Will you go with me?”

“You bet. It’s a deal.”

She smiled at Fox, reminded of Crow and his bargains. “And what do you want in return?”

He considered the bargain carefully. “I want to meet Tat, your mysterious best friend.”

“My other best friend,” she corrected him. She tugged at his hand. “Come with me,” she said. And then the bargain was sealed.

Epilogue ❋

On the night that the Trickster returned to the Rincon Mountains, the coyotes began to sing. Not as they sang most other nights: to hunt, to make love, to cherish the moon; on that night they sang as the angels sing, filling the valley with one great song that rang from the mountains east, west, north and south, to the city below.

He had wandered far in the form of a wolf, a coyote, a fox, a crow, and a man. The Sonoran land that formed Crow’s bones stretched from Arizona into Mexico, but his heart was baked from the Rincon clay and it was there that he always returned.

Now he sat on Rincon Peak, the stars around him like a cloak. He listened to the song of his four-legged kin; then he threw back his head and he answered them. He laughed, the wind whipping back his black hair, delighted with the night, and with himself.

In Red Springs Canyon, the Alders watched as a lame mule deer gave birth to a fawn. The little one stepped into the dark world on wobbley legs, its black eyes wide, trusting the hands that held him, trusting that the night meant him no harm.

In the old ranch stable, Dora del Río did not wake, but Juan listened to the nightsong from his lonely bed on the living-room couch. The coyotes sang, and Bandido howled. Something frozen inside Juan seemed to melt. He missed his wife. He had her love, but he needed more, to earn back her trust. He lay there and prayed that the wounds would heal from a night he still couldn’t remember.

Up the hill, Tomás heard the