The Shape-Changer's Wife

by Sharon Shinn

  She was still holding the door with both hands, but not as though she minded the weight. For a moment, Aubrey thought she would refuse; then she shrugged, and pulled the door wider. He stepped inside. “He’s not here,” she said, as he crossed the threshold. “He ought to be back tomorrow or the next day, though.”

  Aubrey was looking around him in some astonishment, and so at first did not catch the import of her words. The neglect of the outer grounds had led him to expect some deterioration inside as well, but from what he could see of the front hallway and parlor, the house was in utter disarray. Dust lay inches thick on every surface; his boots had sunk in a pile of it, and the woman’s tracks could be plainly seen in this corridor which she had traversed to answer the door. Cobwebs competed with cut glass as the most conspicuous feature of the handsome chandelier hanging over their heads; the iron suit of armor that guarded a niche down the hall was beginning to rust over. A pervasive odor that seemed to rise from the gray bricks themselves was compounded half of dampness and half of dust.

  He could not keep the amazement off his face when he turned to look at the woman who had let him in. Her eyes traveled where his had wandered, to see what had caused him to look so. “It is not so bad in the rooms where we mostly live,” she remarked, seemingly unembarrassed. “Arachne does what she can, but the place is too big. No one ever uses this part of the house, anyway.”

  It was then that he remembered what she had said when he first stepped inside. “You say Glyrenden is not here?” he repeated. “Is it inconvenient that I stay, then?”

  Her eyes came back to him and noticed his travel-stained clothes and the saddlebags he carried over his shoulder. “Oh,” she said. “You were planning to live with us, I take it?”

  He felt suddenly awkward and foolish, both rare things for him. “Well, as Glyrenden’s pupil—but, after all, it is not far from the village, and I can just as easily return each day—and if he is not here—”

  What may have been a smile brushed across her mouth and was gone. “Do not trouble yourself over appearances,” she said. “There are servants here. Of a sort. And none of the villagers is likely to accuse me of entertaining a lover, even if they spoke to my husband, which they don’t. You may stay here easily. I just did not know that was what was expected.”

  Aubrey’s eyes widened a little at this speech. So this was the wife that the barkeeper had mentioned; and no wonder he had looked so odd. She was blunt, graceless and strange, and Aubrey, who could talk to anybody, had no idea what to say to her. “Perhaps once your husband returns. . .” he began tentatively.

  “He will be angry with me if he finds you have come and gone again,” she said, although that prospect did not seem to disturb her much. “Stay until he arrives, at least. After that, you may want to leave again.” And she gave him such a brilliant smile, which made her, for a fraction of an instant, so vivid, he again almost missed the sense of her words; and it was not until he had followed her down the dusty corridor to the large and only slightly less dusty kitchen that he realized what she had said.

  Here, two other inmates of the house were present. One was a small, colorless, middle-aged woman, with a thin and scandalized face half-hidden by a fall of stiff albino hair. She bustled about the room working her arms energetically, wiping at grimy surfaces and snatching suddenly and sporadically at insects winging by. If she was supposed to be cleaning the place, Aubrey thought, she had made very little headway; she seemed incensed at something, muttering inaudibly under her breath, but what she railed against he could not say.

  The other inhabitant was squatting before the unlit fire when they walked in, but rose to his feet with a slow, unbalanced motion. He was quite six and a half feet tall and covered with dark, rough hair on every visible portion of his body except for the flesh immediately around his eyes and nose. His eyes were a dark, dense brown, just now narrowed with concentration, and his huge hands worked themselves into fists and then opened one joint at a time. His mouth, parted to admit his noisy breath, seemed overfull of teeth.

  “Oh, sit down again, Orion. He’s obviously harmless,” said the lady of the house. Her voice was not as sharp as her words. “He has come to study with Glyrenden. You must be nice to him.”

  The huge man kept his intense gaze on Aubrey’s face, but seemed to relax slightly at the woman’s words. “Nice,” he repeated, enunciating the word with difficulty. “Must be nice.”

  Glyrenden’s wife gestured to the little woman still scurrying around the room, head bent over her tasks and indignation drawing her mouth tight. “That is Arachne. She cooks and cleans for us. She fights a losing battle with the dust and dirt, though, and as you can see, it makes her very unhappy. I doubt if she will ever speak to you. She seldom speaks to anyone.”

  Aubrey was beginning to feel he had strayed somehow into a madhouse, but he kept a courteous smile upon his face. “And you are? Somehow I never asked your name.”

  Again, that curious, brief smile touched her mouth and was gone. “I am called Lilith,” she said. “What are we to call you?”

  “Aubrey, of course.”

  “Very well, Aubrey of course, I will ask Arachne to prepare a room for you. It will not be much improved over the rest of the house, though, I warn you. But you will not care about that. You have come to study.”

  He was not sure if he heard mockery in her voice, and if so, why she should mock him, but he replied at once, “Yes, that is true. A roof and a bed are all I ask for.”

  “How fortunate.”

  Arachne did indeed show him to his room, scuttling along before him down a dark and dusty hallway with her head bent to mute the sound of her incessant muttering. The chamber she left him in might not have been cleaned since the day the stones of the house were first piled together. Aubrey actually felt the grit of dirt through the soles of his boots as he walked across the floor to his bed. This was a huge, sagging affair covered with a patched and rotting feather quilt; strips of frayed silk hung from the four fat posters which had once supported a canopy. A delicate border of light showed around one solid wood shutter, but none of Aubrey’s energetic pounding could get the lock to yield and the window to open. If the room offered any other amenities, he could not see well enough to discover them.

  “A strange and wonderful place this is!” he murmured to himself, as he stood in the middle of the shadowy room. He did not know whether to laugh and stay, or despair and make good his escape. “How much of this did Cyril know, I wonder? What a motley collection of disreputable souls are gathered under this dilapidated roof! Can it be any better when Glyrenden returns? And will I have stayed long enough to find out?”

  The next day, however, Aubrey woke to find he could not leave if he would. The previous evening’s dinner had almost decided him against staying even one night in this house, so bizarre and uncomfortable was it. The food was not unpleasant, but entirely unrecognizable as any stew he had ever tasted. Arachne served it to them, nearly running around the table in her haste to ladle out all the portions at once, but she did not sit down and join the others. Orion immediately lowered his head over his plate and began to shovel spoonfuls into his mouth without speaking one word, eating huge quantities of the foreign stew before the meal was over. Lilith ate sparingly and very daintily, mostly nibbling on apples and bread and drinking from a large goblet of water. Aubrey ate without examining his plate too closely, and made a few desultory attempts at conversation before surrendering to a silence too immense for even his social skills.

  Oddly enough, he slept well in the ancient, moldy bed, and woke up thinking he must have dreamt the whole. He was lying in bed, lazily trying to remember some of the events of the night before, when a chorus of thunder alerted him to the fact that it was storming outside. What little light filtered in past the barrier of the shutter was gray and dismal; and now that he listened for it, he could hear the shriek and whine of monsoon winds whistling about the fortress boundaries.

  Trapped, he thought, a
nd got up from bed.

  Lilith confirmed his suspicions when he joined her in the kitchen for a light breakfast. “We have storms like this every so often,” she said, partaking of nothing but some honey which she mixed in a glass of milk. “It’s almost impossible to get the doors open against the pressure of the wind, and it’s just as difficult to keep to the road if you manage to get outside. Not to mention that you’re soaked through in less than a minute.”

  “Then I had best stay indoors, hadn’t I,” Aubrey said pleasantly.

  She lifted those incredible emerald eyes to his. “Had you thought about leaving?” she asked. The question sounded innocent but the look in her eyes was wise, as if she were privy to every thought in his head and had been since he walked into her husband’s house.

  “Not seriously,” he answered, giving her a winning smile.

  She was dressed in a gray gown identical to the one she had worn the night before, and which in fact might be the same one. Her thick brown hair was wound in the same braid, and her face still wore the incurious, placid look it had worn when she answered the door to him. Yet he found himself studying her as if he had not seen her before. There was something in the plain lines of her face and the startling beauty of her eyes that was mesmeric, almost spellbinding.

  “Tell me,” he ventured, “what do you do here for entertainment when Glyrenden is gone and the weather keeps you all in the house?”

  “There is very little to entertain me even when Glyrenden is not away from home,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Surely you do not sit all day and watch Arachne perpetually clean?”

  The briefest hint of laughter crossed the full lines of her mouth. “Even that loses its appeal after a while,” she admitted.

  “Then what do you do when it storms like this?” he persisted.

  “Mostly I stare out the window at the world denied to me.”

  “Do you play cards? Sew? Write letters? You must do something.”

  She tilted her head to one side, ever so slightly intrigued. “I cannot,” she said.

  “Cannot what?”

  “I have no one to write to, I have never sewn, and I do not know how to play cards.”

  His own smile became broader. “Are there cards in the house?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Well, then! I will teach you. We shall spend the day gaming.”

  They sent Arachne, furious, on a hunt for a deck of playing cards and any other diversions she could find. She returned with three decks of standard cards and one tarot deck which Aubrey tossed impatiently aside. Additionally, she had found three pairs of dice, two of ivory and one of onyx set with small rubies; these Aubrey kept. The housekeeper had also unearthed a wooden board game but none of its pieces. It consisted of triangles and circles burned into inexplicable patterns on the wood, and Aubrey had no idea what game was played on its surface. This too he laid aside.

  “All right, then,” he said, shuffling one deck and then laying the cards out in suits. “We begin with fifty-two separate cards—”

  Lilith was a quick learner, he discovered, and by the end of the day he had taught her simple games like Drain the Well and more complex games like whist and picquet. She gave her entire concentration over to the intricacies of the game, fingering each card before she drew or discarded, as if the small colored squares could whisper advice or encouragement. She never lost by much and even defeated him once or twice before the day was over.

  Arachne ignored them completely, moving around them as if they were not present in the room, and once or twice Aubrey was sure she passed her dust rag over his back and shoulders. Orion, however, came to watch them gloomily before the day was half through, and followed the motions of the spades and clubs, diamonds and hearts, with such palpable longing that Aubrey began to lose his taste for the game.

  “We must let him play,” he said to Lilith after Orion had silently watched them for more than two hours.

  “He is not very bright,” she said, which Aubrey thought was unkind with the man sitting so close. “I don’t know that he can learn.”

  “One of the simpler games, then. Drain the Well, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  So they taught him to neaten up his third of the deck before him and to turn over one card at a time, and they told him when his queen took the trick (which filled him with a ferocious elation) and when his two lost to the four (which made him slump back disconsolately in his chair). Aubrey, who was after all a master of sleight of hand, subtly rearranged the cards so that all the kings and aces magically appeared in Orion’s hand, and the big man won the game at last. At first he could not understand it; then he was beside himself with delight and would not let Lilith take the cards back from him when she tried to explain that he had won the game, not the pieces.

  “I told you he wouldn’t understand,” she remarked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Aubrey replied. “I’m tired of cards anyway.”

  It was clear that no one else was going to propose another diversion, so Aubrey began to amuse himself with a few of his simpler but more dazzling magic tricks. He brought coins out of Orion’s ear (and then let the poor simple beggar keep them); he caused Arachne’s apron to lift over her head and temporarily blind her; he took a kitchen knife and pretended to cut off his own hand and reattach it to his knee. Even Arachne paused in her activities to watch this comic performance, and Aubrey thought he saw a real smile come to Lilith’s face while she looked on.

  They didn’t like fire, though. Arachne turned away and returned to her sweeping when he brought blue flame from his fingertips. Orion ducked under the table, yelping, and even Lilith drew back and put her hands to her face in sudden dread. Immediately, Aubrey extinguished the blaze.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to her a little blankly. “I didn’t know you would be afraid of it.”

  She uncovered her face but her cheeks were still ashen. “I have always feared fire,” she said.

  “How do you stay warm, then?”

  Again, that ghost smile, almost not there. “I am never cold, even in winter. It does not take a fire to keep me warm.”

  “You are luckier than me. I am always shivering.”

  “Best not stay here through the winter, then,” she said. “For this is a cold house.”

  That was all that transpired during Aubrey’s first full day in the shape-changer’s house.

  Two

  THE NEXT DAY, Aubrey woke to find fierce sunlight trying to beam its way past the barrier of the shutter at his window; the air held the rich, hot scent of a truly fine day. Once downstairs, he learned that Orion had already left for a day’s hunting and might not be back till after dark.

  “Is he a good hunter?” Aubrey asked.

  Lilith drank her honeyed milk and watched Aubrey finish breakfast. “Very good. Even in bad winters when there is no game to be found, Orion can find meat. Some of the villagers even come to us when winters are hard, and offer to buy his deer and rabbits. But they must be very hungry before they come here for succor.”

  It was the second time she had said something like that, and this time Aubrey followed up. “They don’t like Glyrenden?”

  “They don’t like any of us.”

  “Do you keep away from the village?”

  She shrugged. “I have no reason to go there. Orion goes in once a week or so to buy milk and vegetables and things we cannot supply ourselves.”

  Orion did not seem sharp-witted enough to be able to carry on simple mercenary transactions, and Aubrey said so. “But don’t they cheat him?”

  Lilith smiled. “Cheat one of Glyrenden’s servants? They would not be so foolish. If anything, they are more than fair to him. He does not like to go to the village, though, so he does his best to find what we need in the forest.”

  “If he does not like to go, then why—”

  “Glyrenden makes him.”

  That was all, simply stated, but it gave
Aubrey a chill. Lilith did not seem to miss her husband when he was away.

  “Have you plans for today?” Aubrey asked her. She shook her head. “Then walk with me. I find I am cranky and sore from yesterday’s inactivity.”

  “More likely from last night’s sleep in an uncomfortable bed,” she said, rising. “Let me change my shoes.”

  Five minutes later, they were hiking across one of the forest trails that was only slightly less overgrown than the woods around it. Aubrey in the lead, pushing aside branches and debris, set a spirited pace, seeking to shake off some odd shadow of discomfort that clung to him; Lilith kept up with him without complaint. They spoke very little for the first hour or so, until Aubrey slowed to admire a pretty, open view before them.

  “Very nice,” Lilith agreed. She had rested a hand against one of the big oaks that ringed the clearing, and the brisk climb had brought a certain color to her face. She looked much more alive and vibrant to him than she had in the two days he had known her.

  “Do you walk much in the forest here?” Aubrey wanted to know. “It does not seem like these paths are often used.”

  “I prefer the trail toward the king’s palace,” she said, “but I do not take it much. That is usually the road Glyrenden follows.”

  And that was another odd thing to say. “What is there to see on the trail to the royal court?” Aubrey asked.

  “Nothing much; except, if you walk long enough and far enough, you come to the King’s Grove, and that is my favorite place in the whole realm.”

  He turned to face her. She was not a beautiful woman, but the flat, clear angles of her face continually drew his attention; the depth of her green eyes troubled him. “And what is the King’s Grove?”

  She had changed her position to lean back against the wide trunk of the tree, and she held her shoulders against the wood in a pose that was almost sensuous. She had half-shut her eyes, and she did not look at Aubrey when she spoke. “The King’s Grove is a stand of trees from all over the world, and nothing that grows in this kingdom or any of the three kingdoms farther west is not represented in this preserve. No one may chop down any of the trees in this grove, no one may carve his name in their bodies, no one may even gather firewood from the fallen branches, for this grove is sacred and belongs to the king and will be untouched for so long as there are laws which govern men. It is a beautiful place.”