The Shape-Changer's Wife by Sharon Shinn

ask such a thing! I think you would say they are far more beautiful.”
    â€œThen I had best cover my eyes when I meet them,” Aubrey said solemnly. “Mortal men are not meant to endure such sights.”
    This time she giggled, and shot him a quick sideways look from under her fair brows. “Many mortal men have looked at all three of us together and not gone blind,” she said.
    â€œHow can that be? I feel my eyesight failing even as we speak.”
    It was lighthearted nonsense and she took it as such; she was not quite so unsophisticated as she first appeared, Aubrey decided, but every bit as pretty. Once or twice he caught another young man at the table eyeing him with a certain envy. One of his companions from the hunt actually winked at him when Aubrey glanced his way, then spread both his hands in a brief parody of wingflight. Aubrey knew this masculine signal from days past: “Hunt like the falcon,” it meant, and it was always a sign of approbation.
    Of course he could not claim Mirette’s attention for the whole evening; the man on her other side wanted a chance to flirt with her, and Aubrey too had another companion to entertain. It was late into the meal when it occurred to him to look around for his other friends to see if they were faring so well. Glyrenden was not hard to spot: He sat at the head table, only two or three places removed from his host. It took Aubrey some time to locate Lilith.
    But once he saw her, his gaze stayed for a long time; he felt momentarily disoriented, out of place. She was wearing the green silk gown that he had liked so much, and she had taken some trouble with her appearance. Her dark hair, braided into its customary smooth coronet, was pinned in place with gold combs. She wore the emerald collar Aubrey had made for her from a strand of pearls, and the jewels glowed against her white skin with a startling vividness. Her face had been delicately painted—a blush smoothed onto the flat cheeks, a deep shadow applied under the high arch of the brows—and even from a distance, Aubrey thought he caught the faintest patchouli scent of her perfume.
    And she sat at the brightly lit table with a hundred people, and she watched her plate as she ate almost nothing; and men sat on either side of her and across the table from her, and no one at all looked in her direction. She seemed utterly alone, abandoned, alien and strange. She seemed to sit in a pool of darkness so deep no one was willing to peer into its depths. Whether that darkness sprang from her or was forced on her, Aubrey could not tell, but everyone else at the table, consciously or not, seemed to be aware of it, and to turn away.
    Yet it seemed to him, as he watched her from twenty feet away, that she was more dramatic, more glorious, more alive, and more beautiful than any other human being in the room. The angular face, the heavy hair, the thin wrists, the pale skin, were as familiar to him as his own features, his own body, but they struck him now with an unbearable poignancy. He was pierced to the heart by her troubled incandescence. It seemed impossible to him that no one else in the room noticed her, that no one else stared at her with the same arrested fascination. He could not believe that she was not ringed with men begging for a glance from her eyes or the lightest touch of her fingers. He watched her and he felt vertigo surge through him. If he’d been obliged to at that moment, he could not have risen to his feet and crossed the room. She was the shadowed center in a garish and over-bright universe; she drew him in with the power of her darkness, and he could not look away.
    â€œAubrey,” said a soft voice in his ear, and he started so violently, he almost spilled his wine. The voice laughed, and he managed to turn his head and track down the source. The blond girl beside him spoke his name again.
    â€œAubrey. Aren’t you going to speak to me again this evening?