Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

This — my wife .

They stared at each another. To his — almost angry — astonishment Matt felt no particular fear. He was terrified and yet beyond terror. Or rather all things were so terrible and fearful and Thena and the puma only one slight splinter dazzling from the chaos.

And dazzled he was. For too — so beautiful.

The puma — was beautiful.

It slinked upright and shook away the last beads of water.

When it spun about, it moved like quicksilver, mercury in the jar of darkness — It. She.

He couldn’t follow her now. He would never catch her, as she had become. How curious. There was suddenly, to all of it, a sense only of the normal.

Matt sat down by the creek, where her clothes sprawled in a heap as if dead. Idiotically he had the urge to pick them up, spread them, perhaps fold them in a tidy way. He didn’t.

He tried to decide now what to do, but in fact this seemed redundant. There was no urgency. Was he tired? He couldn’t have said. He selected pebbles, and dropped them idly in the water.

When she came back, which was perhaps only two hours later, she brought a small slain deer with her, gripped in her jaws. He was not shocked or repelled by this. He had expected it, maybe. It had been neatly and swiftly killed by a single bite to the back of the neck. Matt had seen even the best shots among the hands, even Chant, who was a fine hunter, sometimes misjudge, causing an animal suffering and panic before it could be finished. When she, the puma, sat across the carcass from him, watching him, he thought he was sure that what Thena said to him, if wordlessly, was, See, this is better .

And it was. All of it — was.

They slept by the stream, he and the cat, a few feet between them — but when he stirred in sleep once, they were back to back, and her warmth was good. She did him no harm. Though he couldn’t bring himself to touch her with his hands, this was less nervousness than a sort of respect. She smelled of grass and balsam from the pines, of cold upper air, of stars. And of killing and blood.

He hadn’t meant to sleep. Somehow he hadn’t been able to make himself understand.

But in the sunrise when he wakened, the trees painted pink along their eastern stems, Thena was there as a woman. She had dressed and set a fire, portioned the deer, and was cooking it slowly. The glorious savor of freshest roasting meat rose up on a blue smoke.

“Well,” she said.

“Did I dream it?” he said.

“Maybe you did too.”

“No, I didn’t dream. Oh, Thena — what’s that like ? To be— that ?”

“It’s wonderful,” she answered simply. “What else.”

“But you knew me, even then?”

“I know you all. It isn’t I cease to be myself. Or that I forget. Only I’m another kind of me . The true one, do you think?”

After they ate the meat and drank from the stream, they lay back on the pine needles. If until then he hadn’t quite loved her, now he did. That was the strangest part of it, he thought ever after. That he loved her fully then, once he had seen her puma-soul. And he believed, that day, that nothing now could destroy their union. He had confronted the terror, and it was no terror, only a great, rare miracle, the blessing of God. And there was magic in the world, as the myths and stories in books had always told him.

Years on, when he was older, Matthew Seaton sometimes asked himself if this was, precisely, what was at the root of his reaction — magic. Sorcery — a spell. She had put some sort of hex on him, bewitched and made him her dupe.

It hadn’t felt like that. Rather, it had felt like the most reasonable natural thing. And the love — that too.

Surely something wicked might inspire all types of wrong emotion, such as greed or cruelty or rage. But it wouldn’t bring on feelings of pure happiness. Or such a sense of rightness, harmony. Hope.

This then was the worst of it, in one way.

Yet only in one.

They did talk afterward, after the night in the forest. She let him ask his questions, answered them without hesitation. The substance of it was that her shape-switching had begun in infancy. It was the same, she implied, for her father, and when young he had often taken cat form — but it seemed with age he turned to it less and less. Nor had she ever seen it happen. None had. It was for him a private thing. He only told her when he became aware that she also had the gift. And gift was how he termed it, comparing it as she grew older to her talent for the pianotto. He said he had heard his great-grandmother had powers of a similar sort. He never revealed who told him about that.

As to whether Thena had been afraid when first she found what she could do, she replied no — only, perhaps oddly as she was then a child, she had known intuitively to keep it hidden from others. Yet something had prompted her to tell Joz. But it had frightened her not at all. It had seemed always merely what should happen, as presumably it had when she had learned to walk and talk, and presently to read. She said that some of the commonplace human changes that occurred in her body as she became a woman had alarmed her far more.

Again, much later, Matt — looking back at it — was startled by his calm questions and her frank answers. He could remember, by then stunned and oppressed, that at that time nothing about her “gift” anymore disquieted him. Indeed, he left her to indulge in her other life, felt no misgiving, let alone horror. And this of course was horrible. Horrible beyond thought or words.

Stranger too — or not strange, not at all given the rest — was how he began almost to lose interest in her uncanny pursuit, leaving her to solitary enjoyment, just kissing her farewell on such nights, letting her go without a qualm. As if she only went on a visit to some trusted neighbor.

It had seemed to him then that everyone in the house called High Hills, and on their land, knew what Thena did. They must see her come and go but were reassured they need fear nothing from her. Perhaps even the very cattle and sheep that grazed the slopes saw her pass in her shadow-shape, the blood of deer on her breath, and never even flicked an ear. Thena would not prey on her own. Thena, even when puma, stayed mistress and guardian.

Besides, anyhow, by the time the first snows began to arrive, she had told Matt they had something far more important on their hands. She was pregnant. He and she were to have a child.

Thena withdrew into herself in the last months of her pregnancy. Some women did this. Matt had seen it with his own mother, when the younger children came. Rather daunted by the idea of fatherhood, he already treated her with a certain awed caution. Still he was happy, and as the good wishes of the hands poured over him, pleased with himself.

Once the snow eased away, the Family visits began. The Seaton clan was followed by Proctors and Fletchers. He saw people young and old he’d met once at the wedding and barely once since. Joz was just as he recalled, well humored and approving of both the baby, and the running of the farm. But he too was remote somehow, as he had seemed before. It came to Matt, though he scarcely considered it then, that this ultimate remoteness belonged in Thena too. However close and connected he and she might become, some part of her stayed always far off, behind her eyes, beyond the mind’s horizon. As with her father, the puma part of her? The sorcerous and elemental part.