Eithne is made a wife

A dark hand had pulled the blankets down her legs and was already pushing her nightgown up.

Eithne woke with a squeak and jerked her legs away, but she could do no more. At once her body went rigid with more than fright. Even her lungs were lost to her; she could breathe, but not on her own. She felt a crushing weight on her chest: an invisible hand working her lungs like bellows.

Meanwhile a real hand was stroking down her side, down past the bunched cloth of her nightgown and onto her naked hip, and it pulled her legs back onto the bed.

“Stay with me,” he whispered soothingly. “Stay…”

She found she could move her eyes. In her room was the dark of a moonless night, but his black body sheened blue light like the moon.

“Blessed among women,” he smiled. His teeth were bright blue in the light of his face. He had horns on his head.

He was no man. Perhaps he was one of the goddess Dana’s lost people, the dark-​​skinned Sidhe, evil fairies who lived beneath the ancient mounds.

But what had she done? Panicked, she sieved through her memories of the last days. Had she crossed two knives when she laid the table? Had she chased a fairy cat out of the kitchen all unknowing? Had she looked at the new moon through a glass?

He lifted her hips and slid her gown up to her waist.

“Mine alone you shall be, and none harming you.”

She tried to cry out, but she might as well have tried to make another girl cry out in another room. Her body was no longer her own.

And yet she could feel everything. For a while he only reclined beside her, rubbing her bared skin. He stroked her across her belly and down between her thighs, firmly but not roughly, as if she were a lump of dough to be shaped by his practiced hands.

Then he lifted his body over one of her legs to lie between them, and he snapped the edges of his wings out above her, making a canopy over their bodies.

Wings! Quivering, leathern wings like a bat’s! She had never heard of the fairies having wings. Only angels had wings.

She had no less control of her heart than she ever did, but now it seemed to be faltering in its fear, stumbling like a panicked horse just before going down. She thought she would die of fright even before he killed her.

“It is an honor,” he whispered. “My first, my only wife. The sister of you cannot be saying that.”

He gently brushed the hair out of her mouth and lowered his head to kiss it. His mouth was hot wherever it touched her face, but his breath was cold, as if it came from some place other than his body. His tongue tasted like blood.

When he turned his head just so, she could feel the point of one of his horns pressing into the pillow beside her face. When he touched her with his hands, she could sometimes feel the tip of a catlike claw snagging her skin, though he seemed to try to avoid it, and it never hurt when he did.

“It’s a mother I shall make you,” he murmured. “To the most beautiful child…”

That was what he wanted! He did not merely want to hurt and kill her as a man might. Her panic doubled as she began to think of the aftermath – all the rest of her life.

And was this what had happened to her sister Flann? Was this why she would not name the father of her child?

He drew away from her, almost kneeling over her, and pulled her legs up on either side of him.

“It won’t hurt,” he whispered. “No one shall be harming you, not even I.”

For an instant, as his head dipped over her laboring chest, the tip of one of his horns passed near her throat. She threw all her concentration, all her will into trying to jerk her head up to impale herself on it.

But she could no more move than if she had been dead already.

As he had promised, it did not hurt, but she wished for the pain to distract her from the feeling of him slithering into her, stretching her obscenely but painlessly.

She tried instead to concentrate on the hissing of his cold breath in her ear, but soon he began speaking to her, whispering to her in a language so unlike Gaelic that she could not even be certain it was made up of words.

She tried to pray, but she had forgotten how. She told herself it would soon be over, soon be over, soon be over, but it went on and on and on.

At last there was a flash of light of another color. His body went as stiff as hers, and his head snapped up. She heard the thunk of his horns sticking in the wood of the headboard, and then, in a clatter of crumpling wing bones, he was ripped out of her and flung away from her, and she could move.

She could do no more than tumble out of bed. Her limbs were as weak with fright as they had been rigid before. She pulled her nightgown down over her legs, and then she curled her body up against the nightstand to await the aftermath.

Her own skin had become the farthest reaches of the universe. Somewhere outside of it, in a place that did not matter to her, there was a brief struggle, and then all the lights of every color went out, and there was only the dark of a moonless night.

Now she felt pain. She felt the scratches all over her belly and legs, and more than that she felt the burning between her thighs.

She also felt something trickling out of her and soaking into the fabric of her nightgown. She hoped it was only blood.