The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (good books for 8th graders .TXT) 📗

around this man. She looked at him. “What’s the price? What does one have to give up to do this?”

He crossed his arms. “That’s negotiable,” he said with that smile she knew better than to trust. “Tell me, Black Maggie. What will you give me?”

“What did Anna give you?”

He shrugged. “Something she wanted to be rid of. Something she came to regret.”

“Her art,” said Maggie.

“Wrong,” said Crow, amused. “Try again.”

Her eyes widened. “The pregnancy,” she guessed, and she could see by his face that she’d guessed correctly. “You took the baby, didn’t you?”

“Baby? There was no baby,” Crow said. “There was only the idea, the glimmer of one. She was six weeks pregnant. She would have miscarried in another three weeks anyway.”

“But you took it.”

“That’s right. I took it from her belly as a stone—a stone in the palm of my hand.”

“The Night of the Dark Stone…”

The sly smile returned. “How quick you are after all, Black Maggie. It took Cooper forty years to discover that.”

“Why? Why didn’t you tell him?”

Crow cocked his head. “Because it amused me not to.”

“And did it amuse you not to tell Anna that she would have miscarried anyway? Did it amuse you to watch her eat her heart out with guilt and sorrow afterwards?”

The smile never wavered. “The deed was done. The bargain was kept.” He sounded truly puzzled, and Maggie began to grasp just how far from humankind this creature was.

“Where is the stone now?” she asked, eyes narrowed.

His expression grew shifty. “I gave it away.”

“To whom?” she persisted, asking the questions rapidly so that he wouldn’t grow bored.

“To a mage,” he answered.

“Which one?” she shot back.

“You know there’s more than one? Very good. I gave it to the mage who stands in the west.”

Maggie did a quick mental calculation. “That’s the Woodmage, if I remember right.”

His eyes brightened with surprise that she knew this. Good. He wasn’t bored now. He was staring at her with great interest.

“And what did the Woodmage do with the stone?” she asked, the words sounding like a riddle from a folktale, as did his answer.

“She swallowed it,” said Crow.

Maggie blinked. “And that was that?”

“And it grew, and it grew.”

“And then what?”

“She gave birth, in a dry wash bed, nine years later.”

“Nine years?”

Crow gave a bark of fox laughter. “Time is different for us than for you.”

Maggie sat down suddenly, feeling dizzy again, aware that she stood at a cliff’s sharp edge. “She gave birth in a wash bed. Cooper was there. She wouldn’t name the child, or tell him the father’s name, and so he called it after Johnny Gutiérrez,” she said, more to herself than to Crow.

“And I know the story is true for I danced at their wedding and drank at their feast.” said Crow, repeating a line that often ended the folktales of old Europe.

She looked at him sharply. “You told me Johnny Foxxe was human,” she accused.

“But he is. He’s Anna’s and Cooper’s child. It was only his birth that was … unusual.”

“Then María is the foster mother. The Woodmage.”

“The wood wife,” Crow agreed.

“From Cooper’s poems,” Maggie said, understanding at last. “He gave her that shape in his poems. An almost-human shape. She gave birth, she aged—she even loved him in her way,” she added, remembering the tender look on María’s face when she’d showed the old woman Cooper’s journal. “Did Cooper ever know who the child was?”

Crow yawned elaborately. “Cooper, Cooper, Cooper. Always Cooper. Ask him yourself if you want to know.”

“Perhaps I will. If I walked on the spiral path, would I be able to return?”

“If I showed you how.”

“Will you show me how?”

“And what will you give me?” he said. “Now tell me quick!”

She frowned. “What do you want?”

“Your firstborn, the donkey who shits coins of gold, the thing that stands behind your house,” he said.

“No, no, and no. What else do you want?”

“Your poems, your passion, your heat.”

“No,” said Maggie. “What else?”

“Johnny Foxxe.”

“He’s not mine to give,” she said flatly.

“You think not? Well then, Black Maggie, you must make an offer to me.”

“The first poem I write, or the last one.”

“It’s not enough. Quick! Make another.”

“My mother’s ring, that I’ve worn all my life.”

“Almost enough. Quick, quick! Make another.”

Maggie bit her lip, thinking hard. She had information that Tomás Yazzie had said was important—Crow might think so too. But Tomás had also said not to give that information to anyone she didn’t trust.

She said, “All right, here’s my final offer. Take it or leave it.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Am I?”

“What is it then?” he said, his eyes bright with interest.

“I’ll give you my friendship. Besides poetry, it’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at. Tell me, quick, quick! Do you want it?”

“Interesting. No one’s ever offered that before.” He looked her up and down, eyes narrowed. “But is it worth it?”

She rose to her feet. “Davis Cooper thought so. And Tatiana Ludvic. And Johnny Foxxe.”

Crow smiled a feral and sharp-toothed smile. “I accept your bargain,” he said.

“Then we’re agreed,” Maggie told him. She’d worry later about what she’d just agreed to. Her head was spinning with riddles and answers … and the riddles that the answers posed in turn.

“Come,” said Crow, “we’ll prepare you for the journey. The path is not easy for one of your kind. You must become as One of Us.”

“And if I do, will you promise that I’ll return home safe, to my own human shape?”

“No. I make bargains, not promises. It’s not in my nature. I am what I am. But I will hold your essence here like a rock in my hand while your shape walks the past,” Crow told her. “Others have walked on the spiral path and come home again.” The shape-shifter’s face was serious now, and she found that for once she believed him.

She said, “If I walk into the past and talk to Cooper there, what if I say something or do something that changes what happened back then?”

He shrugged, unconcerned. “Then the present is changed, and the future shall be