Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

While he took off his boots, she lowered the lamp. And in the window he saw the stars of the quilt had gotten away, and were returned safely to the midnight sky.

Summer came. It came into the new house too, unrolled over the stone floors in transparent yellow carpets, sliding along the oak banister of the stair, turning windows to diamonds.

Outside the fields ripened through green to blond. In the orchard, apples blazed red. The peach vine growing on the ancient hackwood tree was hung with round lanterns of fruit.

He got along well with the hands, some of whom were Joz Proctor’s, some the roving kind that arrived to work each summer for cash but were known and reliable for all that. Once they were sure Matt knew his business with crops and beasts, they gave him their respect with their casual helpful friendliness. None of them had anything to say about Joz Proctor but what you’d expect, seeing they dealt here with Joz’s son-in-law.

None of them seemed at all uneasy either. Even when their tasks kept them near the house. And none of them had a strange look for Thena — save now and then, on seeing her, one of the newer younger boys colored up or smiled appreciatively to himself.

Every night when Matt went home to the house, the big, cool rooms, well swept and polished, would light with lamps as the day went out. Coming in he might hear Thena too, playing the old pianotto in the parlor. She played quite brilliantly, though she never sang. Sometimes she persuaded Matt to do that. He had a good tenor voice, she said, true to the note. Otherwise, when the meal was done, they’d sit reading each side the fire, which even in summer was generally needed once the sun went down. She might read something out to him, some story from a myth, or piece of a play by some old dramatist or poet. He might do the same. But they seldom went up late to bed. They told each other things besides about their childhood — how he had hitched his first dog to a cart, and ridden over the fields, pretending he was a charioteer from Roman times; how she had seen a falling star once that was bright blue, and no one believed her, but Matt said he did.

She wasn’t one for chores, darning or sewing, left all that to the house girls. But frequently she drove them laughing out of the kitchen, and cooked up a feast for him. Some days they rode out together along the land, debating the state of this or that.

Did he love her by then, so fast? He couldn’t say. But he was glad to come back to her, glad to be with her, always. Thought of her often in the day, especially when he was far off on the outskirts of the mountains, and wouldn’t see her or lie at her side that night.

And she. Did she love him ?

A woman did, surely, if she acted to you as Thena did to Matt. The other girls he had known who had definitely loved him, at least for a while, had acted in similar ways, though none so intelligently and wonderfully as she. She was like a young princess, regal in her generous giving, strict only with herself, and even in that never cold.

How had he ever been wary, been afraid of her? Why hadn’t he known that the stupid tales were only that, just what Chant had warned him of, jealousy and empty-headed gossip? Aside from all else, five full moons had by then gone by. She had been in his arms on each of those nights and never stirred till morning.

For Matt’s wife was no more a were-beast, a shape-twister, than the sun was dead when it set.

It was getting on for leaf-fall, and the farm busy and soon to be more so with harvest.

That night they went upstairs directly after supper, around nine by the sun-clock, for Matt needed to be away with the dawn.

He was brushing her hair. His mother had let him do this too, when he was much younger. It had fascinated him then, did so now, the liveness of a woman’s hair, its scents and electric quiverings, as if it were another separate animal.

“When will you be home again?” Thena asked, her eyes shut as she leaned back into the brush. Any woman might ask this of her young husband.

“Oh, not for a night, I’d say. More’s the pity.”

“I see,” she said. She sounded just a touch — what? Unhappy? He was glad to hear.

“Maybe,” he said, “I can get back tomorrow, very late — would that do better?”

“No, Matt,” she said. “Don’t hurry home.”

Something in him checked. He stopped the brushing.

As if joking, he said, “Why, don’t you want me home if I can be? Would I disturb you so much arriving in the little hours? You don’t often mind when I wake you.”

She put out one of her slim calloused hands, and covered his wrist. “Come home if you want, Matt. It’s only, if you do, I may be from the house.”

The pall cleared from his brain. Of course. There was a baby about to be born, several miles off at the next big farm. Joz’s other kin, one of the Fletcher family. Probably they had asked Thena, now a married woman, to help out when the time came.

“Well I’ll miss you. I hope Fletcher’s wife is swift in delivery, for her sake — and mine.”

“Oh, Matt, no, I’m not going there. That child’s not due till Honey-mass.”

Again taken aback, he left off brushing completely. He stepped away, and with a mild Thank you , she gathered all her hair in over her right shoulder like a waterfall. She was going to braid it and he wanted to stop her. He loved her hair loose in their bed. But he said nothing of that now. He said, “Then why won’t you be at home at our house, Thena?”

Her hands continued braiding. He couldn’t see her face. Matt moved around her and seated himself across from her in the large carved chair in the corner. He could still tell nothing from her face. Nor did she reply.

He said again, very flat, “Do you want me to think you have some fancy lover you like better’n me? If not, say where you’re going.”

Then she answered promptly. “Into the forest.”

The bedroom lamps were trimmed and rosy. None of them went out. But it was as if the whole room — the house — the land outside — plunged down into a deeper, darker darkness.

All these months he had disbelieved and nearly forgotten his earlier fears. Yet instantly they returned, leaping on him, sinking in their fangs, their claws, lashing their tails to break the panes of night and of his peace.

“The forest? Why? No, Thena. Look at me. And tell me the truth.”

She let go of the braid.

She raised her head and met his eyes with her topaz ones, and abruptly he knew that no woman’s eyes, even in sidelong lampshine, ever went that color.

As if she simply told him the price of wheat, she said to him, “Because I have a need now, sometimes, to be that other thing I am. The thing not human, and which once you saw, when I came down from the woods to look at you as you fished, by the river in the moon.”

Matt shook from head to foot. He could barely see her, she seemed wrapped in a mist, only her eyes burning out at him. “No—” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s how it is with me. It isn’t at full moon I have to change, nor any other time, not in that way. But sometimes — as another woman might want very much to wear a red dress, or to eat a certain food, or travel to a certain house or town — like that . I have a choice. But I want to and choose now to do it.”

He saw in his mind’s eye what she had chosen then — as another chose to visit or wear red: the mountain cat with its pelt of dusk. The puma. The shape-twist .

“No, Thena — no, no.”