The Changeling Bride (3 page)

Tatiana’s tail thumped more rapidly, and her jaws opened in a soft pant.

Elle rolled out of bed and went to take a shower, scratching at her scalp on the way. When she was a child her hair had been the color of a bright new penny, but by the time she began to come to terms with that misfortune, nature had dulled the shade, as if hair, like copper, could tarnish. Her freckles, too, had faded with age, although perhaps that was a result of sunscreen, and summers spent indoors rather than out in the fields chasing crickets and dragonflies. Her eyes tilted up a bit at the corners and were a deep rich hazel, a striated mix of green and brown.

She soaped up in the shower and wondered for the thousandth time if she should start that diet she was always planning. It was only when trying on new clothes in the hideous glare of dressing-room lights that her weight truly bothered her. It was depressing to stand in one’s underwear, getting that unfamiliar backside view, noticing anew the way her bottom and hips were padded with fat. Her bustline was unremarkable, usually set to disadvantage by a bra turned gray with age, the little satin bow between her breasts hanging crookedly by a final thread.

If she stayed away from fashion magazines, she could almost believe what a friend had once told her—and even take it as a compliment—that she had the figure of a Greek statue, symmetrical and proportionate, devoid of the overstated breasts and starved hips that populated advertisements. The friend had gone on to say that her face fit that description as well, for surely a strong nose such as hers was not fashionable today, but perhaps a few millennia ago, it and the rest of her face would have
served as a model for Athena or Aphrodite. Elle liked to think so, but knew it wouldn’t do her much good until she met a man who, upon setting eyes upon a museum statue of a Greek goddess, refrained from commenting on what a cow the goddess was.

She dried her celestial frame and dressed in mundane jeans and T-shirt, a goddess masquerading as merely mortal. She found a half-stale bagel and toasted it for breakfast, then ate it while standing at the kitchen counter contemplating the bunch of overripe bananas in her fruit bowl. Another Saturday, she mused, in the thrilling life of Wilhelmina March.

Elle pulled her parka hood over her head and stepped off her patio onto the squishy wet grass. Tatiana raced ahead, her white fur the only spot of brightness in the rain-drenched landscape.

Elle trudged along behind her, following her up the path that led into the woods. Mud sucked at her hiking boots and slid underfoot, and her breath was loud in her ears. If it weren’t for Tatiana, she’d spend the day under a quilt on the couch, a book in one hand, a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses in the other, banana bread in the oven.

Once under the canopy of evergreens, her mood lightened. There was nothing here to remind her that her student loan payments had doubled last month, or that it would be another ten years before she could even start to think about saving money to buy the bed-and-breakfast that was her vague dream for the future. No reminders of her dismal romantic life, either.

Tatiana crashed and bounded through the low-growing Oregon grape, collecting burrs in her long fur, her paws black with mud. Elle wished she could be equally as enthusiastic about exercise.

After trudging uphill through the mud for another ten minutes, she stopped to catch her breath, breathing heavily in the quiet. The hairs on the back of her neck started
to rise, the feeling of being watched suddenly overwhelming her. She spun around, her heart in her throat, but all that faced her were trees and undergrowth, dripping and silent. Tatiana had disappeared.

“Tatiana! Here, girl!” she called, slapping her thigh with one hand. “Tatiana!”

She heard a “woof” from somewhere above her on the hill, followed by a chain of excited barks. There was a crashing in the undergrowth, then more barking. Elle felt a chill of adrenaline wash over her, her heart beating hard. Someone or something was watching her, she could feel it.

“Tatiana!” she called again, her voice quavering up a half octave. A squirrel suddenly chittered angrily from the branches of a tree up the hill, and then Tatiana bounded into view.

Elle let out a shaky breath. Just a squirrel. There was no one here, nothing to be afraid of. She tried to shrug off the sense of being observed, of not being alone. “Don’t disappear again, okay?” she told the dog. As lousy a bodyguard as Tatiana was, she did make Elle feel safe in the woods. She trusted Tatiana’s ears and nose, and was less likely to talk herself into believing she was being stalked by a mountain lion, or that a gang of teenage boys was waiting around the next bend to attack her, if she had Tatiana romping along beside her, unconcerned.

The path continued up the hill in a series of long switchbacks, then meandered over and around the connecting hills. Elle gradually relaxed as she walked, squishing contentedly through the mud. She shoved her hands into her parka pockets, her fingers encountering loose coins and Kleenex. In her right pocket was a stiff piece of paper. She pulled it out.

The bright pink color stirred her memory.
The old woman on the bus
. Idly curious, she unfolded it as she walked, then stood still to read it. There were hearts
drawn around the border, and in the middle was written:
COUPON GOOD FOR: ONE FREE HUSBAND
. And in small print on the bottom,
REDEEM AT WILL
. The cheap black ink had worn off in the folds.

So much for no reminders of her romantic life. She turned the coupon over. The back was blank. It sounded like one of those 1-900 chat lines where women talk for free, only the idiots who’d made the coupon had forgotten to include the phone number. She laughed at the absurdity of it.

She resumed trudging along the trail, fiddling with the paper as she walked. It had been three years since her last serious relationship had ended in a glorious blaze of agony, and it was beginning to seem possible that she might never marry. She didn’t want to be a spinster aunt, though, devoted to her dog, invited over to Jeff’s house for Easter and Thanksgiving and Christmas, the family being careful to include her so she wouldn’t feel as lonely and pathetic as she was.

She was also, she admitted to herself, getting tired of doing everything alone, and getting tired of hoping that she might meet the right man. There were times at the grocery store when she would pass by the bridal magazines and be unable to resist thumbing through the pages, imagining a fairy-tale wedding of her own. Maybe that was why she wasn’t more adamant with Jeff about the blind dates.

The perfect marriage, she mused, was an arranged marriage. No emotional agonies, just a commitment to a partnership with a firm basis in financial stability. The divorce rate was proof enough that marriages based solely on love led primarily to misery.

She stopped again and thrust the coupon into the air. “I’m redeeming my coupon!” she said to the towering Douglas firs. “I want my free husband. Give me a man who is civilized, owns a very big house, and doesn’t expect me to dote on him.” The trees dripped in response.
She tilted her head back, looking up into the dark, greenish-black branches, the hood of her parka sliding off. “Do you hear me?”

Drops plopped on her face, making her blink. She lowered her head and pulled the hood back up. She gave the paper another little shake at the forested gloom. Nothing happened. Quiet and solitude surrounded her. The trees appeared unimpressed.

“See, Tatiana? Nothing.” She turned to look up the side of the hill, to where Tatiana had been digging near a fern, and gasped. A human face was staring back at her. He was no more than fifteen feet away, perched on the hillside, dressed in rags, his hair wild. Tatiana was beside him, sniffing curiously at his sleeve. Elle felt the panic flush through her, her skin tingling, her ears pricking in an atavistic response to danger.

His eyes met and held hers, and then she felt a tingle in the fingertips that held the coupon. She glanced down and saw the paper dissolve into shimmering pinpricks of light. Her eyes raised quickly to his, her lips open, her body cold with fright.

“She wants him,” the man pronounced.

“Oh, yes,” came a high voice off to Elle’s left.

“Indeed, she’s willing; she agreed!” came another from behind her.

She turned quickly to each of the voices, finding herself surrounded by derelicts, male and female, filthy and decayed. Her glance skipped from one to the other. With a sense of unreality she recognized the old woman from the bus, and then the man who’d followed her on the street. Their eyes were all the same glowing yellow-green.

“She agrees,” one said, the phrase repeated by another, and then yet another.

“She agrees, agrees, agrees,” they chorused, their voices filling her head—echoing, ringing—dizzying her.
She couldn’t focus her eyes, her sense of balance was failing . . . and then the voices stopped.

Elle staggered, and her eyes cleared. She was alone in the forest. She took a deep breath, quivering. Tatiana sniffed at the space where the man had been.

A rumbling roar sounded from the hill that rose above her. She snapped her head up. Trees shifted. The hillside looked like it was coming towards her for a moment, trees and ferns and all, and then it stumbled, turning over on itself, becoming a wave of dirt and rock and falling trees, and she screamed. The wave washed over Tatiana, pulled her under in a flash of white, then hit Elle with such force that she knew only blackness.

Chapter Three

Elle woke to hands tugging at her clothes, stripping her. Her eyes opened to dim phosphorescent light glowing from the walls of a narrow cave. The hands belonged to dainty, fairylike men and women, their hair wild and uncombed, wearing filmy shifts that floated about them in the cool draft than blew through the cave.

Her brain felt about as clear as a bowl of oatmeal. “What are you doing?” she finally thought to ask. She felt weak, too weak to struggle against the hands.

A tittering of giggles met her query. They had her naked now but quickly dressed her again, this time in a loose, white garment. The others dragged her clothes over to a figure lying nearby and began to dress it.

Elle gathered her energy and rolled over on the rocky floor, stones pressing into her belly and ribs, to see the figure better. It was a woman lying there, her limbs unnaturally loose. Elle reached out and touched her arm. It was cool and slack.

“ ’Twas the influenza that got her,” one of the fairy women said.

“Influenza,” the others repeated, relishing the word.

“Is she dead?” Elle asked, her mind floating.

“Dead, yes yes, so dead, so very dead.”

Elle pulled herself up closer to the dead woman’s head. Her face . . . Elle frowned at the corpse. That was her face there, on the dead body. Her Grecian nose, her mouth, her freckles, her dull red hair.

Elle reached out, gently touching the woman’s face, not quite believing that it wasn’t herself. The woman looked like she had been very sick, her eyes sunken in purplish circles. Her hair was in a loose braid, like Elle’s, only it was a foot longer. One of the fairies took the braid in his hand and sliced off the extra inches with a small knife, then looked at Elle and smiled a tight, strange little smile.

“Who is she?” Elle asked.

“She’s you,” one woman said.

“Or you’re her,” said another.

“Or will be, or were,” the others put in, giggling.

“I don’t understand,” Elle said.

They laughed. One of the women touched Elle’s forehead with cold, hard little fingertips, and her strength began to drain even further.

“Wait,” Elle protested. “I don’t understand. . . .” Her eyes drooped shut, and gentle hands lowered her to the ground.

When she woke again she was lying on a hillside with the dark night sky above, the fairies around her. She felt the way she did when awakened too suddenly from sleep, when the patterns of dreams still held sway over her mind and she could not form a coherent thought.

The odd people were giggling and whispering among themselves. The small hands helped her to stand, and she felt damp grass beneath her feet. Someone swung a dark
hooded cape over her, concealing her white gown that glowed faintly in the night.

It was very dark: A quarter moon was the only illumination. There was no reflected peach glow from city lights, no street lamps visible in the distance. All she could see was the irregular line where the black horizon met the charcoal sky. She heard the wind, and the noises of night creatures: an owl, frogs, a dog barking somewhere far, far away. She shivered in the breeze, her feet already chilled by the damp ground.

They took her hands and led her down the hill. She had no sense of time, or of how far they walked in the dark. Eventually the grass and mud beneath her feet changed to smooth, unevenly set stones. When she looked up, a building loomed like a giant shadow against the sky and stretched off to either side in unfathomable dimensions of blackness.

All but two of the fairies drifted away from Elle, and the remaining pair led her to a door that they opened without touch. They took her inside, up two flights of stairs, and at last onto the thick wool carpeting of a hallway, at the end of which a candle burned in a sconce upon the wall. It illuminated a wide white door, its brass handle glimmering in the candlelight. It opened silently as they approached, revealing a large bedroom.

A low fire burned in the fireplace, its flames casting flickers of warmth upon the face of the woman who sat slumped in a chair beside it, fast asleep. She wore an apron over her long dress, and a white cloth cap covered most of her hair. Elle could just make out the shapes of the furniture, largest of which was the four-posted, canopied bed, its draperies pulled back and its soft white covers disarranged. A desire for sleep so strong that it weakened her knees swept through her, and she stepped longingly towards the mattress piled high with pillows, her two escorts pulling the hooded cape from her.

Her companions watched silently as Elle crawled into
the bed, never once considering that it was not her own. She nestled down onto her side and watched from half-lowered lids as one of the youths approached her. The boy touched Elle’s forehead, and she sank into sleep.