“Did you see?” he asked. There were tears on his face, or perhaps just steam on his hot red cheeks. She looked at him, speechless, and inclined her head. Fox stood, and he came close to the fire. He wore only jeans; his chest was bare and his skin smoked where the gleam of sweat met the chill of the cold night air. He sat down beside her, smiling at the sight of the coyote asleep between them.
“You’re out of wood,” she said finally. The fire was burning down.
“That’s all right. We’ll let it burn out soon.” He picked up a pouch, drew out a handful of something and tossed it onto the embers. A sharp, sweet fragrance filled the air.
“Am I allowed to ask what it is you’re doing?”
“A lot of sweating.” He laughed suddenly. “The stone people were very hot tonight. This is cedar I’m putting on the flames, to thank them.” He showed her the dried green leaves in his palm, then tossed another handful.
“Why was there smoke inside the hut?”
“In the willow lodge? It was from the stones.” He wiped sweat from his face and said, “The stones are from the mountainside. So is the willow, and so is the wood that fuels the fire, heating the stones until they glow red hot. Then I took the stones inside, and poured water from Red Springs on them.”
“Like a sauna,” she said.
He nodded. “Like a sauna. Like a sweat lodge. Like many other rituals from cultures all around the world. It’s one way I know of to talk to the land. And to let the land talk to me.”
“And do they always come when you do this?”
“They never have before. They may never again. But they did tonight, and that’s enough.” He looked at her, his eyes full of shadows. “I’m glad you were here,” he said.
Maggie was silent, watching the dying flames. After a while she told him, “I needed to see you. To talk to you.”
“What about?”
“About them.”
He looked at her closely. He said, “I’m going to wait here until the fire goes out. Then I’m going to go home, make some tea, and eat—I’ve been fasting all day. Why don’t you come back with me, have some tea and some food, and then we’ll talk?”
“All right,” she said. Beside her, One-Eye stirred in some coyote dream. The night was still as the fire burned low; she could hear the distant cry of an owl, the bark of a fox, the chatter of the stream, but the coyotes were silent in the hills and the night air seemed empty without them. This would be what every night would sound like if the poacher and others like him had their way. The world would be a tamer place. And that, Maggie thought, would be a loss.
Fox rose and put on warm, dry clothes, unself-conscious as she watched him dress. Then he pulled the tarp from its circular frame. Underneath were stripped willow boughs lashed together. He carefully untied them, and soon all that was left was a pile of long, thin poles. He broke them up and fed them to the fire. The wood was green and it hissed as it burned. Fox kneeled down, and picked up the tin whistle. “This one is Irish,” he said to her. Maggie didn’t know if he meant the whistle, or the song he played as the willow burned.
When the fire grew low, he played another song. The fire burned down to embers again, and then to hot ash that he covered with sand. By the time they left the clearing, carrying the tarp, a bucket and Fox’s bulky pack, it was as though nothing had ever been in the clearing that night at all.
When they reached Fox’s cabin the place was cold, but a fire in the hearth began to heat it up. He tossed her a shirt. “Here, put this on. You’re going to freeze in your own.”
The shirt was wool flannel, a red plaid faded from many washings, and it smelled like Fox. “Ummm. Nice and soft. Look out,” she warned him, “or you might not get it back.”
“But it’s not black,” Fox teased her. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in color before.”
“Neither has half of the western world,” said Maggie as she buttoned it up.
He put a pot of water on the stove. “Look, I’m afraid it’s just pasta tonight, and sauce from a jar. I’m not much of a cook.”
Maggie went over. “Let me see what’s in your fridge. We can always doctor the sauce.”
“Be my guest. I’ll brew the tea,” he said. “I think I can handle that.”
As she sauteed garlic in olive oil with slices of fresh green Mexican chilis, she began to tell Fox everything she knew about Anna Naverra and Davis Cooper. And about the creatures Naverra had painted, still haunting the mountainside. She told him about Thumper, and her meetings with Crow. Then she looked at him closely, eyes narrowed. “You believe me. I can see it in your face. Nigel would have had me committed by now.”
“Nigel doesn’t live on this mountain,” he said. “Nigel wasn’t in that lodge tonight.”
Maggie smiled at the incongruous mental picture of Nigel by that fire in his Armani suit. But then, she thought, looking down at Fox’s red shirt and her jeans, torn and streaked with ash, she wasn’t exactly the same woman who’d first come to this mountain herself.
Fox said, “So Anna didn’t believe that her paintings had somehow created these creatures?”
Maggie shook her head. “Anna believed that all she was doing was creating shapes for them to wear. Like clothes, she said, that they put on for our sake, not for theirs. I think maybe they’ve always been here.”
“They seem to be part of the land,” he said. “They’re probably as old as it is—assuming time even works the same for them as it does for us.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Because of Cooper, and that ‘Time is a spiral’ business of his that I never understood.”
Maggie sighed. “I sure wish Cooper were here. I’ve got about a million questions to ask him.”
“And what makes you think he’d answer them?” Fox asked her drily.
“You’ve got a point.” She tossed the contents of the frying pan into the steaming pasta. “Have you got some plates?”
He produced two and they took the food over to the fire, sitting on the Mexican rug with the plates held in their laps.
“This tastes good.” He glared at her. “Is there anything that you don’t do well?”
“Are you kidding? I can’t do much of anything at all except write—and I’m not always so sure about that. I can’t paint, or speak Spanish, or balance my checkbook…”
Fox grinned. “You can do a mean Cajun two-step.”
“That’s because I have a good teacher.” She took another bite of pasta, then she said, “Now Nigel, he was Mr. Perfect. For years I felt like a bumbling incompetent—it didn’t matter what it was, Nigel did it all well.”
“Not everything,” said Fox. “He lost you, didn’t he? I can’t think of a stupider move than that.”
Fox held Maggie’s eyes for a long moment, and she felt her cheeks burn. She looked away. She looked into the flames instead. She hadn’t felt this way in a long, long time—not even with Crow, for that had been madness. She hadn’t felt this way with anyone in all the years since she’d left Nigel. And she wondered if she was really ready to feel this way again.
Fox broke the silence. “You know, Maggie, there’s one thing you still haven’t told me.”
She glanced at him warily.
He said, “How is it you can charm coyotes into your lap? I want your secret. I’ve been trying to make friends with them all my life, and only Cody lets me near.”
Maggie bit her lip. She hadn’t told him about Pepe, or her thoughts about his own sisters. Now she took a deep breath and she told him about One-Eye, and the poacher, and Lillian’s comments about Cody. She watched as his face flushed with anger over the poacher, and then as it paled when he drew the same conclusions. He was silent when she finished. Then Fox rose and went outside; he closed the door behind him. He stayed out there for a long while. When he came back in, he brought more firewood. He put a thick log onto the flames, then he sat back down, his arms around his knees.
“Of course,” sh
e said, tentatively, “this is only speculation.”
“Is it?” He sighed and rubbed his face with his hands. “I don’t know what to say. I wish I could tell you that you’re out of your mind. But I can’t. I can’t pretend that I’ve never thought there was something … unusual… about my sisters. I’m going to need more time to think about this.” He looked up at Maggie suddenly. “Does that mean you think I’m one of them too?”
“I thought about it. But no, I don’t.”
He attempted a smile. “Because if I am … well, hell, it’s news to me.”
“You want to know what I think?”
He nodded cautiously.
“I think your mother told you the truth: your father was some sweet-talking Tucson cowboy who probably split when she got pregnant. She had the twins ten years later, right? Maybe that’s when she met Crow.”
He nodded slowly. “Could be. It makes sense,” he admitted. “At least, as much as any of this does.”
“Maybe we could talk to your sisters tomorrow?”
He groaned. “They’re as bad as Mama.”
“Then maybe I should try to talk to Crow again. He still owes me an answer or two.”
Fox looked at her sharply. “I don’t trust this Crow. I think you should stay away from him.”
“Cooper didn’t trust him either,” Maggie said. “He had something to do with what happened to Anna.”
Fox frowned. “Then promise me you’ll stay away from him.”
Maggie shook her head. “I can’t do that.”
“All right, stubborn woman—how about promising that you’ll please be careful if you see him again?”
“I think I can manage that,” she said. “I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
Fox rose and took the plates away. She heard dishes clattering in the sink. “Do you want another cup of tea?” he asked.
“Sure,” Maggie said. Then she got up herself, and followed him over to the small kitchen. He was up to his elbows in soapy water, and it made an endearingly domestic picture. When he reached for the kettle, there were suds dripping from the glint of silver on his wrist.
“Do you want herb tea or black? Or coffee?”
Maggie picked up a towel and began to dry a plate. “Actually,” she said, not looking at him, “I don’t really want any tea at all. I just wanted an excuse not to go home yet.”
“Then don’t go home. Spend the night with me.”
She swallowed. The room was warm, and something was melting inside of her—it felt like her bones. She looked at him and he turned from the stove and gave her an apologetic smile. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. The sofa folds out into another bed if you don’t want to be alone tonight.”
Maggie looked down, embarrassed, and overwhelmed by the weight of her own disappointment. If her mind had decided she wasn’t ready to fall in love, her body had clearly decided something different. “Thanks,” she said, her voice husky, “but I think I should go on home after all. It’s getting late—and I don’t think there’s really anything out there to be frightened of.”
“Except the poacher,” Fox pointed out. “And whoever, or whatever, killed old man Cooper. At least let me walk you home, Maggie. Completely unnecessary I’m sure—but humor me anyway, okay?”
Fox turned off the flame under the kettle, screened the fire in the hearth, and loaned her his denim jacket against the cold. The wind had risen. Clouds blocked the stars, and the temperature had dropped several more degrees. Coyotes were hunting farther up the canyon, quite a few of them by the sound of their cries. Crossing the yard to the mesquite wood, Maggie wondered where One-Eye had gone to now. Back to Angela and Isabella? Or perhaps into the midnight hills where coyotes who were only coyotes roamed and nothing more alarming than that.
Maggie and Fox were silent as they followed the path through the mesquite trees. Hag-stones rattled by the wind made a dry, lonely sound overhead. Her earlier ease with Fox was gone and Maggie felt a certain sadness for that; she was too aware of him now for ease, too conscious of his presence at her side. He also seemed nervous. Perhaps he could tell what she’d been thinking about him. Perhaps she had ruined their friendship now, and just when it had come to matter to her. As they left the wood and crossed the yard, Maggie silently cursed herself; she should have kept that vow she’d made to Tat about men, and stayed away from Johnny Foxxe.
They reached the house, passing beneath the raised arms of the Three Graces. She climbed onto the porch and turned to Fox. “See?” she said. “No bogeys in the dark. Not even little Thumper tonight.”
“How do you know?” he asked her curiously.
“The door’s still shut and locked for once,” she told him as she fished out her key and flipped the deadbolt open.
“Well, goodnight, then.” Fox hesitated.
She waited. He stood frowning at the door, as though something about it disturbed him.
“What is it?” she asked him.
“Well—,” he said. He looked at his boots, and then looked up. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a cup of tea?”
She looked at him, startled. “You really want some tea?”
“No,” Fox said, with a sheepish look. “I want an excuse not to go home.”
She stared at him. Their eyes were on a level. She stepped closer to him, shivering. “Don’t go home, Fox. And don’t suggest sleeping on the goddamn sofa either.”
As Fox put his arms around her, he said, “I think I can manage to promise that.”
He smelled of fire, of mesquite smoke; he tasted of clear, sweet creek water; the touch of his skin was as hot as the desert sun as he gathered her close.
• • •
Crow stopped on the trail to Rincon Peak, closed his eyes, and shifted shape. He was human now, but he no longer wore the face Maggie Black had found so compelling, or Anna Naverra before her. Now his face was thinner, longer, the tattoo markings more pronounced. He was half-ugly and half-beautiful, mirroring the duality at his core.
He looked down the trail the way he had come, annoyed by points of light far below. At the midnight hour, the land should be still but for the movement of the night creatures, the owls, the bats, the mountain lions, and the smaller creatures that they hunted in the shadows of the waxing moon. But here were humans spread across the hill, searching the mountain for one of their own kind. If he cared to do so, Crow could tell them that the hiker they sought, a college student, lay at the bottom of a small ravine, thirsty, delirious, swollen and dreaming a rattlesnake’s poisonous dreams. He would probably die before the searchers found him. This meant nothing at all to Crow. The boy would survive; or the boy would die, gifting the carrion eaters with life. Either way, it was dammas, that-which-moved. Crow continued to climb.
When he reached the peak, he sat cross-legged in the dirt. The mountains spread below him, as far as human eyes could see, and farther, to the edges of the world. He sat and he waited. He did not wait long. The others came, as come they must. The calendar drew them—toward the one night in all human Time that belonged to them.
He shifted into another of his many Trickster shapes: his Laughing Coyote shape now, wearing a coyote’s tawny head on the lean, brown body of a man. Bells were tied around his shins; he held seed rattles in his lap. He’d play the clown, the fool, tonight. He did not belong in their mage-circle. They would tolerate his presence here, for Tricksters were outside the rules, outside all of the things that bind, and thus both above and beneath them. Crow’s coyote mouth gaped in a smile, the pink tongue hanging to one side, as they gathered on the mountaintop. Amused, he watched them come:
The Windmage arrived from the sky, trailing storm clouds in his wake. The boy settled on a perch of stone, his owl wings lightly fanning the air, his face masked by white feathers.
The Floodmage arrived from the south and sat down at the Owl Boy’s feet. The Drowned Girl wore a thin, wet dress, her bright hair knotted up with weeds. Beads of moisture seeped from h
er white skin and puddled on the ground.
The Rootmage arrived from below and stood, patient, immovable. A plump creature with a wrinkled green face, eyes like pebbles and a toothless smile, she had hag-stones hanging from the rags of her clothes and a white stone strapped onto her back.
The Woodmage arrived from the west, wearing a mask of white sycamore bark. Her cloak was stitched from the small brown leaves of acacia, ironwood and mesquite; the long, twiggy sticks of her hair rattled lightly in the wind, and her dry limbs creaked.
The Stonemage dreamed this gathering from his rocky bed in the mountains to the north. He was the One-Who-Sleeps, a mage of granite, volcanic ash and quartz. When he turned in his sleep, rock slides filled the canyons; if he woke, the mountains would fall.
It took six mages to form the circle: earth, sky, the four directions. Within that circle was the spirit, the mystery, the wild beauty of the land it enclosed. But the Nightmage, of the eastern hills, was missing from his midnight haunts—missing now for many years, as humans reckoned Time. A seventh mage had replaced the missing one, to keep the circle whole: a Spiritmage. A human mage. And now that seventh mage was missing too—or not missing, precisely, for they knew exactly where he was. He was dead. The earth cradled his bones. His spirit was beyond the spiral path.
The Floodmage stood. She was the Dark Hunter who wore the shape of a pale young girl. This paradox was pleasing to Crow, and he listened closely as she spoke. “Tomorrow I shall loose my Hounds again and they shall hunt. Do any here dispute this?”
The wind groaned as it crossed the peak. It tugged at the girl’s white hair, the Owl Boy’s feathers, the leaves of the Woodmage’s cloak. The Rootmage braced herself against it and she said in a voice not unlike the call of the wind, “No, but is that wise?”
The girl smiled. “What has that to do with me? Wisdom belongs to you, Grandmother. Wisdom belongs to the soil, not the flood. I have spent many months in preparation. I will now set things in motion, that’s all.”
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