Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

She left him immediately. She walked out of the bedroom, and went to the other little bedroom, and shut the door. And Matt went on sitting in the carved chair. He sat there until four in the morning, when anyway he must get up for the dawn ride.

Afterward he never recalled much about what he did that day. It was to do with the stock, fences, something of that sort. But though he dealt with it, it was never him. And by sunfall he and the men were up along Tangle Ridge, the black forests curling below, and the house he shared with Thena far away.

He always thought of her. But today he had thought of nothing else.

Matt kept asking himself if he had heard her rightly. Had she truly said what he recollected? Or was he losing his wits? But even though he couldn’t fully involve himself in his work, he knew he had seen to it. And what he had heard the other men say to him had been logical and coherent . While everything he’d looked at was what you would reckon on. The sun hadn’t risen in the north, and now it didn’t sink in the east. So he hadn’t gone mad, nor had the world. What she had said, therefore, she had said. He’d not imagined it.

He did wonder — why? for it scarcely mattered — how she had known he was fishing that past night at the river. But it seemed to him, uneasily, the puma side of her had sharper senses — perhaps she had picked up the scent of him, found him in that animal way. Tracked him.

Or was she only lying ?

Was it all some damned lie, meant to throw him, scare him — yet why’d she do that? She loved him — maybe she didn’t.

Maybe she hated his guts and it was all a plan to be shot of him, or else send him crazy and get rid that way.

By sundown his head ached.

He wanted only to go to sleep, off beyond the fire, solid rock under him, and the stars staring back in his eyes.

But instead, having let the horse rest herself a while, and having shared a meal without appetite, Matt swung again into the saddle. The men laughed at him, just a bit, not unkindly. He and his wife had been wed less than six months. No wonder he’d want to ride home through the night.

The horse picked her way off the ridge, and an hour later, delicate and firm footed, in among the pines.

The trees had the tang of fall already on them, and the streams were shallow as they trickled downhill.

Every glint of moonlight, every deeper shadow, took on the form for him of topaz-green-glass eyes, a slink of four-legged body, round ears, pointed teeth—

But it never was.

The moon was only a little thing, thin and new and curved. Like the shed claw-case of a cat.

Three more hours he rode down through the forest, into stands of larch and oak and amberwood. In the end he must have fallen asleep, sitting there on the sure-footed mare. But the horse knew the way, the way home.

Matt reached the house before sunrise. By the time he went up to the bedroom, he was thinking in a sort of dream. He thought she would be there, asleep, her gold hair on the pillows. But she wasn’t there. And in the house no one was about, and outside the man who had come to stable the horse, old Seph, was the same as he always was. Not a sign anyplace that anything was wrong. Except the empty bed and, when Matt tried the door, the other smaller room was also empty. He slept in there anyway, in the smaller room.

When he woke again it was full day and everything going on at its usual pace. And when he went down, Thena was in the parlor, helping one of the girls to clean some silver, both of them laughing over something. And Thena greeted him apparently without a care, and came over to kiss his cheek. And murmured, “Don’t upset the girl. Make pretend all’s well.” So he did. And having had his breakfast, he went out to the fields.

They didn’t meet, after that, he and Thena, till supper.

Silence had come back with him. It made a third at the table. When the servants left them, there they were the three of them: he, Thena, the silence.

In the end he spoke.

“What shall I do?”

He had thought of all sorts of things he might say — demands, threats, making fun of it even. Or saying she had made a fool of him because he’d believed her.

But all he said was that. What shall I do?

She answered him straight back. “Come out with me tonight.”

“—come out—”

“Come out and see for yourself. Oh,” she added, “I don’t think you’ll faint away, will you, Matthew Seaton? Or run away. I think you’ll take a book-learned scientific interest in it. Won’t you?”

“To see you change—”

“To see me change into my other self.”

“My God,” he said. He gazed at the plate, where most of his food lay untouched. “Is it true?”

“You know it is. Or why this fuss?”

“Thena,” he said.

He put his head into his hands.

At last she came and rested her own hand, cool and steady, on his burning neck. How human it felt, this slim hand with its scars, human and known , and kind.

“In God’s world,” she said, “so many wonders. Who are we to argue with such a wise magician as God? Midnight,” she whispered, as if inviting him to an unlawful tryst. “By the old door.”

Then, she was gone.

The old door led from the cellar. You got down there by way of the kitchen, but only Thena and he had a key to the cellarage. Going to meet her there he partly feared, his distress so overall he barely felt it, that already she would be— in that other shape . But she wasn’t. She was just Thena, her hair roped round her head, and dressed as she did to go riding.

Together they slipped out into the soft cold of an early fall night.

Stars roared like silver gunshot in the black. No moon was up, or else it had come and gone; Matt couldn’t recall what the moon did tonight, only that it wasn’t full, was in its first quarter, and that the moon had no effect on her. To alter was her choice . Puman.

They didn’t take the horses. They strode from the house and farmland, up through the tall tasselled fields, reached the woods and went into them.

Again, silence accompanied them all this while.

Then, all at once, Thena turned and caught his face lightly in both hands and kissed his mouth.

“This is mountain country, Matt, it isn’t the Valley of the Shadow.”

And then —she was darting away among the trees, and he too must run to keep her in sight.

The trees flashed by. Stars flashed between. The mountains lifted beyond, very near-seeming, very high, a wall built around everything, keeping everything in. Was it possible to climb right up those mountains? Get over them to the other side? Tonight it seemed to him nothing lay on the other side. For here was the last border of the world, what the ancients had called Ultima Thule .

She stopped still in a glade, where already the rocky steps showed that were the first treads of the mountain staircase. A creek ran through, and Thena pulled off her clothes, everything she wore, and loosed her hair out of its combs as she had that very first night. Clothed now quite modestly in the striped dapple of the starlit pines, she lay down on her knees and elbows and lapped from the stream, as an animal did.

He couldn’t see her clearly. Couldn’t see — Only how the shadows shifted, spilled. Fell differently. She was a young woman drinking from the water, then a creature neither woman nor beast — and next, in only half a minute — or half a year, for that was how slow it seemed to him — she was the puma in its velvet pelt, raising its muzzle, mouth dripping crystal from the creek, its eyes marked like flowers, and tail slowly lashing.