The Beastly Bride

1: THE BRIDE

Since he was eight years old, Matthew Seaton understood he was betrothed to a girl up in the hills. As a child it hadn’t bothered him. After all, among the Farming Families, these early hand-fastings were quite usual. His own elder brother, Chanter, had wed at eighteen the young woman selected for him when Chanter and she were only four and five.

Even at twelve, Matt didn’t worry so much. He had never seen his proposed wife, nor she him — which was quite normal too. She had a strange name, he knew that, and was one year younger than he.

Then, when he was thirteen, Matt did become a little more interested. Wanted to know a little more. Think of her, maybe, just now and then. “She has long gold hair,” his mother told him, “hangs down to her knees when she unbraids it.” Which sounded good. “She’s strong,” his father said. “She can ride and fish and cook, and use a gun as handily as you can, it seems.” Matt doubted this, but he accepted it. Up there, certainly, in the savage forested hills that lay at the feet of the great blue mountains, skills with firearms were needed. “Can she read?” he had asked, however. He could, and he liked his books. “I’ve been told,” said Veniah Seaton, “she can do almost anything, and finely.”

It wasn’t until the evening of his fourteenth birthday that Matt began to hear other things about his bride.

Other things that had nothing to do with skills and virtues, and were not fine at all.

Matt was seventeen when he rode up to Sure Hold, now his brother’s house, wanting to talk to Chanter.

They sat with the coffeepot before a blazing winter hearth. No snow had come yet, but in a week or so it would. Snow always closed off the outer world for five or six months of each year, and Chanter’s farm and land were part of that outer world now, so far as Veniah’s farm was concerned. This was the last visit, then, that Matt could make before spring. And his wedding.

For a while they talked about ordinary things — the crops and livestock, and a bit of gossip — such as the dance last leaf-fall, when the two girls from the Hanniby Family had run off with two of the young men from the Styles. Disgrace and disowning followed, it went without saying.

“I guess I’d fare the same way, wouldn’t I, Chanter, if I just took to my heels and ran.”

“I guess you would,” Matt’s brother replied, easy, only his eyes suddenly alert and guarded. “But why’d you run anyhow? Have you seen someone you like? Take up with one of the farmgirls, boy. She’ll get it out your system. And you’ll be wed in spring.”

“To Thena Proctor.”

“To Thena Proctor.”

“I’ve never met her, Chant.”

“No you haven’t, boy. But others have on your behalf. She’s a good-looking lady. Our pa wouldn’t ever pick us any girl not fit. Take my wife. Pretty as a picture and strong as a bear.”

Matt looked off into the fire with his blue eyes full of trouble.

Chanter waited.

Matt said, “Did you ever hear — a tale of the Proctor girl?” “Yes.” Chanter grinned. “Gold hair, waist narrow as a rose stem, and can wrestle a deer to the ground.”

“How does she do that then, Chant?”

“How the heck do I know, Matt?”

Matt’s eyes came back from the hearth and fixed like two blue gun-mouths on Chanter’s own.

“Does she perhaps leap on its back, sink in her claws, fangs in its neck — drag it to the earth that way?”

Chanter winced. And Matt saw he wasn’t alone in hearing stories.

Matt added, slow and deadly, “Does her long hair get shorter, yet cover her all over? Do her paws leave pad-marks on snow? Are some of her white front teeth pointed and long as my thumb?”

Chanter finished his coffee.

“Where you hear this stuff?”

“Everywhere.”

“You must see it, sometimes men get jealous — our pa is rich and so we’ll be too — some men want to fright you. Malice.”

“Chant, you know I rather think these fellers were set — not to scare — but to warn me.”

“Warn you with horror tales.”

“Are they tales? They said—”

Chanter rose, angry and determined.

So Matt got up too. By now they were almost the same height.

They stood glaring at each other.

Chanter said, “They told you old man Proctor is a shape-switcher. He sheds his human skin of a full moon midnight and runs out the house a mountain lion.”

“Something like that. And she’s the same.”

“Do you think our pa”—shouted Chanter—“would hand-fast you to a—”

“Yes,” said Matt, cool and hard and steady, though his heart crashed inside him like a fall of rocks. “Yes, if the settlement was good enough. Enough land, money. The Proctors are a powerful Family. Yet no one else made a play for Thena.”

“Because they knew we Seatons would ask for her.”

Matt said, “This summer, late, about three weeks back, I had to ride up that way, through the forests. Let me tell you, brother, what I saw then.”

That evening Matt hadn’t been thinking at all of the Proctors. Some cattle had strayed, so he and his father’s hands rode into the woods above the valley. The landscape here was like three patterns on a blanket: the greener trees, birch, maple, oak, amberwood, with already a light dusting of fall red and gold beginning to show; next up the forests on their higher levels, spruce and larch and pine, dark enough a green to seem black in the leveling sunlight; last of all the mountains that were sky-color, etched in here and there by now with a line of white.

In less than two hours it would be sunfall. Once the cattle had been found, on the rough wild pasture against the woodland, they minded to make camp for the night and ride back to the Seaton farm the next day.

Matt had known most of these hands since boyhood. Some were his own age. They joked and played around while the coffee boiled on the fire. Then Ephran remembered a little river that ran farther up, where the first pines started. He and Matt and a couple of others decided on some night fishing there. It would be cooler, full moon too, when the flap-fish rose to stare at the sky and were easy caught.

After supper, going to the river, it was Ephran who spoke to Matt. “I guess you know. Joz Proctor’s place is all up that way.”

Matt said, “I suppose I did.” It was perhaps strange he hadn’t recalled. But then, he’d never been exactly certain where the Proctor farm and lands began. Hadn’t ever tried to learn. Never been tempted to come up and see. It seemed to him right then, as they walked on into the darkness of the forest, he hadn’t cared to, nor even wanted to remember now. He added, lightly, “Ever been there, Ephran?”

“Not I. It’s all right, Matt. We’re at least ten miles below the place.”

“Think old man Joz would reckon I was out to spy on him otherwise, to see what I was getting? Run me off?”

“No. Not that.”

They walked in silence for a while after this. The big moon was rising by then, leftward, burning holes between the trees.

Ephran, who was eighteen now, had never been one of the ones Matt had heard muttering about Joz and his golden daughter. The first time, when he had been fourteen, Matt had felt he overheard the mutters, anyhow. Later though he’d wondered if they meant him to, less from spite or stupidity than from that idea of forewarning — just as he was to say to Chanter.

What had the men said? “… bad luck for the boy. He don’t know no better. But Veniah Seaton should’ve.” “By the Lord, so he should.” And the lower, more somber voice of the old man in the corner of the barn: “Not a wife he’ll get, but a wild beast. A beast for a bride. God help him.”

There’d been other incidents through the years after that. In front of Matt even, once or twice — given like a piece of wit: “Proctor, that old puma-man—” “Joz Puma’s Farm. ” Matt took it all for lies. Then for games. Then—

Then.

The river appeared.

It was slender and coiling, moonlit now to sparkling white. The other men went on, and Ephran paused, as if to check his line.

“Listen up, Matt,” said Ephran, “you don’t want to worry too much. About her.”

“Why’s that?” said Matt, again light and easy.

“Because there are ways. Do your duty by her. There’ll be no hardship there. Do that, and let her keep her secrets. Then when the time’s right, you can be off. Not leave her, I don’t mean that, Seatons and Proctors have a union, you’ll have to stay wedded. But big place, the Proctor lands. Plenty to do. Just let her be. Don’t — try an’ rule her, or get on her bad side — jus’ do as you want and let her do as her wants. That’s the bestest way.”

Matt said, “So you think it’s true?”

Ephran scowled. “I don’t think no thing at all.”

“She’s a shape-twist.”

“I never said—”

“And her daddy before her.”

Ephran glared in his face. “Don’t you put words in my mouth. You may be the boss’s second-born but I’m freer ’an you. Ican go off.”

Matt had the urge to punch Ephran in the mouth. So instead he nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s go fish.”

They fished. And the moon and the fish rose high. They laid the slim silver bodies by for breakfast, and not another word was spoken of the Seaton hand-fast or the Proctor house not ten miles away above, beside the forest.

It was when they had enough catch and were making ready to go back down to the camp.

Matt glanced up, and there across the narrow river, less distance from him than the other men, it stood, pearl in moonlight, and looked at him.

He hadn’t seen one alive. In fact only the drawn one in the book of pictures, when he was schooled.

They haunted the forests and the lower slopes of the mountains. But they were shy of men, only slipping from the shadows of dawn or dusk, once in a while, to kill them. The last occasion one of their kind had killed one of Matt’s had been in his childhood, about the time, he thought, he had seen the book-picture. Puma.

None of the other men seemed to have noticed. They were busy stringing the fish.

For the strange moment then, he and it were alone in utter silence, total stillness, unbroken privacy, eye to eye.

Its eyes were smoky and greenish, like old glass, and they glowed. Its coat was smooth and nacreous, glowing too.

Matt thought it would spring at him, straight over the water for his throat or heart. Yet this didn’t quite matter. He wasn’t afraid.

He could smell the musky, grassy-meaty odor of it.

It opened its red mouth — red even by moonlight — and for a second seemed to laugh — then it sprang about, and the long thick whip of its tail cracked the panes of the night apart like glass as it sped away.

All the men whirled round at that and were staring, shouting. Old Cooper raised his gun. It was Ephran bellowed the gun down.

Like a streak of softest dimmest lightning, the racing shape of the great cat slewed off among the pines, veering, vanishing. Behind it, it left a sort of afterimage, a kind of shine smeared on the dark, but that too swiftly faded.

None of them spoke much to Matt as they trudged down to the pasture. In the camp, each man quickly settled to rigid sleep. Matt lay on his back, staring up at the stars until the moon went all the way over and slid home into the earth like a sheathed knife.

“So I wondered to myself,” said Matt to his brother Chanter in Sure Hold now, “if that was Thena Proctor, I mean, or her daddy, come down to take a look at me.”

Chanter strode to the fire and threw on another log.

“You pay too much mind to the chat of the men. Are you sure you even saw that big cat?”

“Oh, I did. All of us did. Ephran was white as a bone. He stopped Cooper shooting it. Could it even have died though, I wonder?”

Then he left off because he saw Chanter’s face, and it had altered. He had never seen Chanter like this before. Not in a good humor, or in a rage, nor with that serious and uneasy expression he had whenever he had to pick up a book, or the daft, happy smile he gained if he glanced at his wife. No, this was a new Chanter — or maybe a very young one, how Chanter had been perhaps when he was only a child.

“Matt, I don’t know. How can I know? I know our pa meant well by us — both. But I think — I think he never thought enough on this. Probably it’s all crazy talk and damn foolery. Those upland Families — they go back a great way, hundreds of years, deep into the roots of the Old Countries. What you saw — what Joz Proctor is — and she, the girl — I’ve only ever gotten sight of a little sketch someone made of her. Good-looking as summer. But Pa met her. He liked her mightily. Uncommonly fine, he said.”

“The puma,” said Matt on a slow cold sigh, “was beautiful. Silk and whipcord. Pearl and — blood.”

“God, Matty. Thena Proctor’s a human girl. She has to be. She must be. Human.”

Matt smiled. He said, softly, “Puman.”

2: THE MARRIAGE

A spring wedding.

The valleys and hills were still wet with the broken snows, rivers and creeks thick and tumbling with swelled white water. The scent of the pines breathed so fresh, you felt you had never smelled it before.

In the usual way among the Families, neither bride nor groom had been allowed to look at each other. That was custom. The old, humorous saying had it this was to prevent either, or both, making off if they didn’t care for what they saw. None had the gall to try that in the prayer house. Well, they said, ha-ha, only a couple of times, and those long, long ago.

And Matt? He hadn’t taken to his heels. He had left off asking questions. He simply waited.

No one around him among the Seaton clan acted as if anything abnormal went on. Even Chant didn’t, when he and his Anne came to call. He didn’t even give Matt a single searching glance.

Matt had anyway grasped by then that he was quite alone.

He’d dreamed of it, the mountain cat, two or three times through the winter. Nothing very awful. Just — glimpsing it among trees by night, or up on some high mountain ledge, its eyes—male — female—gleaming.

They drove, trap horses burnished and a-clink with bells, to the prayer house, done up in their smartest, Matt too, bathed and shaved and brushed, the white silk shirt too close on his neck.

What did he feel? Hollow, sort of. Solid and strong enough on the outside, able to nod and curve his mouth, exchange a few words, be polite, not stammering, not stumbling, not in a sweat. His mouth wasn’t dry. He noticed his mother, in her new velvet dress, haughty and glad. And Veniah, like a person from a painting of A Father: The Proud Patriarch.

They are stone-cut crazy. So he thought as they drove between the leafing trees and into the prayer house yard. They don’t know what they’ve done. And along with the hollow feeling, he had too a kind of scorn for them all, which helped, a little.

Inside the building there were early flowers in vases, and all the pewter polished, and the windows letting in the pale clear light. Everyone else, the representatives of the Families, were well dressed as turkeys for a Grace-giving Dinner.

He stood by the altar facing forward, and the minister nodded to him. Then the piano-organ sounded in the upper storey, and all the hairs on Matt’s head and neck rose in bristles. For the music meant that here she was, his bride, coming toward him. He wouldn’t turn and look to see — a mountain cat in human form and wedding gown, on the arm of her father, the other human mountain cat.

She wore a blue silk dress.

That he did see from the corner of his eye, once she stood beside him.

She had only the kind of scent he would have expected, if things were straightforward, cleanness and youngness, expensive perfume from a bottle.

When they had had their hands joined, hers was small and slender, with clean short nails, and two or three little scars.

“And now, say after me—”

He had to look directly down at her then. Not to do so as he swore the marriage vows would have been the action of an insulting dolt — or a coward. So he did. He looked.

Thena Proctor, now in the very seconds of being made over as Thena Seaton, was only about three inches shorter than he.

She was tanned brown, as most of the Farm Family daughters were, unless kept from learning on the land — brown as Matt. Her eyes were brown too, the color of cobnuts.

She was attractive enough. She had a thinking face, with a wide, high forehead, arched brows, straight nose, a full but well-shaped mouth with white teeth in it. Not that she showed them in a smile.

She met his eyes steadily with her own.

How did she then reckon all this? Oh, marry him for the Seaton-Proctor alliance, the benefit of extra land and power for her clan. And then, when bored, kill him one night out in the fields or forest, with a single swift blow of her puma paw — pretend after, with help from her pa, some other thing had done for him.

Matt had shocked himself.

He felt the blood drain from his face.

That was when her cool hand, so much smaller than his own, gave his the most fleeting squeeze. She shut her right eye at him. So quick — had he imagined — she winked?

Taken aback, yet she’d steadied him. He thought after all she was real. Or was it only her animal cunning?

Her hair was arranged in a complicated fashion, all its gilded length and thickness braided and coiled, part pinned up and part let fall down — like corn braids made for Harvest Home.

Matt liked her hair, her eyes, the way she had winked at him. He liked her name, the full version of which the minister had said — Athena. Matt knew from his books Athena was the wise warrior goddess of the Ancient Greeks. It might have been fine, really fine, if everything else had been different.

They ate the Wedding Breakfast in the prayer house Goodwill room, among more bunches of flowers.

Here Matt finally met Joz Proctor, an unextraordinary, rangy, dark-haired man, who shook Matt’s hand, and clapped him on the back, and said he had heard only worthy and elegant things of Matthew Seaton, and welcome to the Upland Folk.

There was wine. Matt was now like a pair of men. One of whom wasn’t unhappy, kept glancing at his new young wife. One of whom, however, stood back in hollow shadows, frowning, tense as a trigger.

Joz had given them a house, as the head of each Family generally did with the new son-in-law. Chanter’s house was like that too, gifted by his Anne’s father. So after the Breakfast, under a shower of little colored coins of rice paper, Thena and Matt climbed into a beribboned Proctor trap, and Matt snapped the whip high over the heads of the beribboned gray horses, and off they flew up the hill, in a chink of bells and spangle of sunlight. Just he and she. They two.

“I guess you’d like to change out of that.”

This was the first real thing she said to him since they’d been alone — really since they’d met by the altar.

“Uh — yeah. It rubs on my neck.”

“And such smooth silk too,” she said, almost. playful.

But anyhow, they both went up the splendid wooden staircase and changed in separate rooms into more everyday clothing.

When he came down, one of the house servants was seeing to the fire, but Thena, Athena, was lighting the lamps. The servant seemed not to mind her at all. But then, even wild animals, where they had gotten accustomed to people, might behave gently.

They ate a late supper in candlelight.

“Do you like your house, Matthew?” she asked him, courteously. This was the very first she had spoken his name.

“Yes.”

“My father spent a lot of thought on it.”

A lot of money too, obviously. “Yes, it’s a generous and magnificent house.”

“I’d like,” she said, “to alter a few small things.”

“I leave that to you, of course.”

“Then I will.”

The servant girl came around the table and poured him more coffee, as Maggie would have at home. But this was home, now.

“Tomorrow I’ll ride out, have a word with the men, take a look at the land,” he said in a businesslike way.

“No one expects it, Matthew, not on your first day—” she broke off.

Indeed, nobody would, first morning after the bridal night.

He said, “Oh, well, I’d like to anyhow. Get to know the place.”

He had already seen something of the grand extent of it as he drove down in the westering light. Cleared from the surrounding woods and forest, miles of fields awaiting the new-sown grain, tracts of trees kept for timber, cows and sheep and goats. Stables and pigpens, orchards with the blossom flickering pink. The house was called High Hills.

There was an interval after the brief discussion. A log cracked on the hearth. But the servants had gone and let them be. Over the mantel, the big old clock with the golden sun-face gave the hour before midnight.

“Well,” she said, rising with a spare seamlessness, “I’ll go up.” Then she made one flamboyant gesture. She pulled some central comb or pin from her braided hair and it rushed down around her, down to the backs of her knees, as promised. As it fell, it frayed out of the braids like water from an unfrozen spring and seemed to give off sparks like the fire.

She turned then to look at him over her shoulder.

“No need for you to come up to me yet, Matthew Seaton.” She spoke level as a balance. “Nor any need to come upstairs at all. If you’d rather not.”

“Oh but I—” he said, having already lurched to his feet as a gentleman should.

“Oh but. Oh but you don’t want me, that’s plain enough. I have no trouble with you. You’re a strong, handsome man, with very honest eyes. But if you have trouble with me, then we can keep apart.”

And so saying she left him there, his mouth hung open.

It was nearly midnight, his coffee cold on the table and the candles mostly burned out, when he pushed back his chair once more and went after her up the stair.

At her door he knocked. He thought perhaps she was asleep by now. Did he hope so? But she answered, soft and calm, and he undid the door and went in.

The big bedroom, the very bed, were of the best. White feather pillows, crisp white linen sheets, a quilt stitched by twenty women into the patterns of running deer and starry nights.

Thena sat propped on pillows. Her hair poured all around her like golden treacle. She was reading a book. She glanced at him. “Shall I move over and make room, or stay put?”

Matt shut the door behind him.

“You’re a splendor,” he said, coloring a little at his own words. “All any man’d want. It isn’t that.”

She looked at him, not blinking. In the sidelong lamplight her eyes now shone differently. He had seen a precious stone like it once — a topaz. Like that.

“Then?” she quietly asked.

What could he say?

Something in him, that wasn’t him — or was more him than he was — took a firm sudden grip on his mind, his blood, even perhaps his heart. He said, “I’d like it goodly if you would move over a little, Thena Seaton.”

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.

3: THE WIFE

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.”

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.

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.

4: THE BEAST

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.

As the fields greened with new summer, Thena told Matt she believed the baby might come a little early.

Soon heavy with the child, she hadn’t, from her fourth month, gone off anymore at night. They did not discuss it. It seemed to him only sensible that she didn’t indulge the shape-switch at this time. Though she had done it, he realized at the beginning of her pregnancy, perhaps not yet aware she carried. What effect would such an action have on the growing being inside her? He never asked her that and never himself fretted. He trusted Thena. Again, in the future, he would remember that. And curse himself as blind.

Now and then, on certain nights, he did find her at a window, gazing out toward the forests and mountains. He noticed, when she gazed — he liked to see it — one of her hands always rested protectively on her swelling stomach.

Thena was right. The child was nearly two weeks premature.

He was away the day her labor started. Returning he found the house moving to a kind of ritualistic uproar. The doctor’s trap stood in the yard, women ran up and down the staircase. No one, however, forgot Matt’s comforts. Hot coffee and fresh water stood waiting. The bath had been drawn. His evening meal, he was assured, was in preparation.

When urgently he asked after his wife, they tried to keep him from her. The doctor was there, and two of the Proctor-Fletcher women. Finally he let them see his anger — or his nerves — and they allowed him to go up too.

Thena was in the bed, blue rings round her eyes, but smiling gravely. “Brace up, Matthew,” she told him. “Within the hour I’ll have it done.”

Then they shooed him out again, the women. And twenty minutes after he heard Thena give a loud savage cry, the only violent noise she had made. He dropped the china coffee cup and bounded up the stair, where the doctor caught him. “All’s nicely, Matt. Listen, do you hear?” And Matt heard a baby crying.

“My wife—” he shouted.

But when they let him go in again Thena lay there still, still gravely smiling, now with the child in her arms.

The baby was a girl. He didn’t mind that, nor the fact the fluff of hair on her head was dark, not golden. And he praised the baby, because that was expected, and too, if he didn’t, some of them might think he sulked at not receiving a son. But really he hardly saw it — her, this girl, if he were honest. She was just an object, like a dear little newborn lamb, useful, attractive — unimportant. All he cared about was that Thena had come through the birth, and held out her hand to him.

Fatherly feeling might have found him later. He didn’t seek it. More than all else, as the month went on, he felt a sort of confusion. For now another was with them. He and Thena — and the child. Three of them. Like the silence that had been with them that other time, he and she, and it.

He had a dream one night, and for a while on other nights. Always the same. There was no definite image, only vague shiftings of shade and moonlight in what might be forest. And an unknown voice, not male or female. Which said quietly to him in his sleep, “Thena.” And then, “The puma’s daughter.” And this upset him in the dream, as if he didn’t know, had never heard even a rumor of shape-twisting, let alone seen her change, lain back to back with her in that form, eaten of her kill, loved her better for all of it.

There was a piece of music Thena had sometimes played. Matt couldn’t ever remember the composer; he’d never liked it much. Beginning softly and seeming rather dull to him, so his thoughts wandered, then abruptly it changed tempo, becoming a ragged gallop full of fury and foreboding, ending with two or three clashing chords that could make you jump.

The sun-clock showed the days and nights as they went by. The farm’s work-journal showed the passage of weeks and months. The seasons altered in their ever changing, ever unalterable fashion. As did the moon.

People came and went as well, in their own correct stages of visit, hire, service.

It wasn’t so long, anyhow. Far less than a year. Far more than a century.

In this space they grew apart, the husband and his wife. Like two strong trees, one leaning like a dancer to the breeze, the other bending at a tilt in the earth, backward, sinking.

It was Matt who sank and looked backward. He tried to recapture what they had been before the child came. Or what he believed they’d been. But the child was always there somewhere, needing something. Present — if not in the room, then in the house — and a woman would appear to fetch Thena, who left her cooking or the pianotto, or put down her book, and went away.

But then Thena too began to go away on her own account. There was a nurse at such times, for the child. The notion was that this allowed Matt and Thena a night together. But on those nights she didn’t remain with Matt. It was the forest she went to, like a lover.

For she never said to him now, Come with me. And he never offered her company. She wouldn’t want it, would she? She had company enough, her own.

How thin, he thought, her profound patience must be wearing with her child. She was its slave. He must let her go.

The baby was starting to toddle and was due to be God-blessed soon at the prayer house, and there was to be a big party. Spring was on the land again also, calling up sap, and extra work, and memory.

And a night fell when Matt was exhausted, sleeping as hard as if he were roping cows or tying the sheaves. Yet he woke. Something wakened him.

He lay on his back in their bed and wondered what it was — and then saw the moon burning in the window, full and white as a bonfire of snow.

The room was palest blue with light, and in a moment more he saw Thena was gone from the bed. Putting out his hand, he felt that her side of the mattress was cold.

Nor was this a night for the nurse to watch the baby. It must be lying in the cot in the corner, and would wake and begin it — her — loud lamb’s bleating for Thena — and Thena wasn’t there. So Matt sat up and looked at the cot, and it was empty. Empty as the bed, and as anything meant to hold something else safe, when a theft has happened.

If never before had the child meant anything to him, now suddenly she did.

Her name, at the God-blessing, was to be declared as Amy.

Matt called it aloud, Amy! Amy!and sprang from the covers. He rushed to the small room, where the nurse slept when the cot was moved there — but no one was there now, not the nurse, never Thena and the child. He’d known this would be so.

Matt flung on his clothes, his boots. He dashed down through the house. Nobody was about. Not even out in the stable. He slung the saddle on his horse and galloped away, straight through the young-sown fields, cleaving them.

He knew where she’d gone, Thena, his wife.

His heart was pounding in his brain, which was full too of one terrible picture. He thought of the old religious phrase: And the scales drop’t from mine eyes.

Blind — blind fool. She was a beast, daughter of a beast. A mountain cat — and she had taken his child with her up into the wilderness of pines and rocks under the glare of the bitter, burning moon.

Oh, the picture. It lit his mind with terror as the wicked moon the world. A puma running with its red mouth just ajar on a thing held clamped within its jaws, a small bundle, with a fluff of darkish hair, faintly crying on a lamb’s lost bleat.

It was as he entered the first mass of the trees, looking up, he saw. Bright-lighted on a shelf of stone above, trotting through from one tree line to another. The silver puma with the little bundle, exactly as he saw it in his head, gripped in by the sparkle of white teeth.

He pulled the horse’s head round so sharply she swerved and almost unseated him. Frozen, he clung there, staring up at his baby in the fangs of death.

Peculiarly none of this had made a sound, or attracted the attention of the cat. The child didn’t cry. Could it be—she had already killed it?

Then the pines reabsorbed them, those two joined figures, and the hex broke from him and he floundered from the horse and left her, and ran, ran up the chunky side of the mountainous forest, with his hunting rifle in his hand.

In any myth, or tale like that, he must have located them. In reality it wasn’t likely. He knew it, and took no notice. Matt was living in a legend. And this was finally proven, when at last he ran to the brink of the cold blue moonlight. And there they were, on the ice-blue grass, Thena and her baby. And they—

They were playing. But not as a human mother and her human infant ever play. For Thena was a mountain lion, and Amy was her cub. No room was ever shined up by a lamp so bright to show Matt, clear as day, the sleek puma mother, rolling and boxing with the energetic cub, it carelessly nipping her, and she gentle and claw-sheathed, while both their dusken pelts gleamed from moon-powder, and their crimson mouths were open, the mother to mimic growls, the infant to spit back and warble as best she could. Openmouthed, they seemed to be both of them, laughing. But when the play ended and the puma lay down to lick the cub for a bath, her hoarse purr was louder in the night than any other sound.

Matt stood by the tree that hid him. He thought after, they should surely have known he was there, only their total involvement with each other and themselves shut out his presence. Hidden as if invisible, he might have ceased to exist.

So he watched them for a while. And when the moon passed over, and the edge of the forest was no longer a flame of light, but a shattered muddle of stripes and angles, he was yet able to watch one further thing. And this was how both creatures changed, quick and easy, back into their human form. Then there she was, Thena. And her baby. And Thena picked up the child, and kissed her, and humanly laughed and held her high, laughing, proud and laughing with joy, and the little child laughed back, waving at the night her little hands which, minutes before, had been the paws of a cat.

She had never been his. Neither of them. Not Thena. Not Thena’s daughter. No, they came of another race. The shape-twisting kind. Him she had used. And could Thena harm her baby? Never. Thena loved her. Knew her. They were to each other all and everything, and needed no one else on earth.

He’d wondered in the before-time, if it was possible to ride all the way up to some mountain pass, and so cross the mountains and get over to the other places, where other people were. Human people. Ordinary.

That night Matt Seaton, with only his horse and his gun, and the clothes he stood in, climbed up the side of the world, and combed the ridges until he did find some way through. He left all behind him. His kinfolk, the Seaton-Proctor alliance and the Families, his property, himself. His marriage and his fatherhood he didn’t leave, they’d been stolen already. Stolen by his jealousy. By his cheated humanness, and his lonely human heart.

TANITH LEE has written nearly 100 books and over 270 short stories, besides radio plays and TV scripts. Her genre-crossing includes fantasy, SF, horror, and young adult, historical, detective, and contemporary fiction. Plus combinations of them all. Her latest publications include the Lionwolf Trilogy: Cast a Bright Shadow, Here in Cold Hell, and No Flame But Mine, and the three Piratica novels for young adults. She has also recently had several short stories and novellas in Asimov’s SF Magazine, Weird Tales, and Realms of Fantasyas well as the anthologies The Ghost Quartetand Wizards.

She lives on the Sussex Weald with her husband, writer/ artist John Kaiine, and two omnipresent cats. More information can be found at www.tanithlee.com.

The Beastly Brideis a very evocative title. From it I got the instant idea of a reverse of the usual “Beauty and the Beast” scenario — this time the reluctant and alarmed young man going uneasily to wed an unknown and supernaturally beastly young woman.

(Of course, sometimes one forgets, in any strictly arranged marriage sight unseen, there may well be severe qualms on both sides.)

Then I needed to decide what kind of beast. I chose the puma (or mountain lion) because though I’ve always loved its beauty, its cry, heard by me in a movie when I was about eleven, seemed terrifying. (Strangely, that cry is the one pumaesque attribute not mentioned in this tale.) With the puma settled on, its natural habitat was also immediately there, less a backdrop than a third main character: a parallel North American Rockies, probably around 1840.