Greymist fair, p.15
Greymist Fair, page 15
“I come back for you,” he said. “Always for you. You know that, don’t you?”
She lifted her eyes from the bouquet and met his. “I had hoped so.”
He was starving. For touch, for nearness, for warmth, for love. He wondered if she could see it in his face.
“Could we speak?” he asked. She stepped aside to let him into her cottage. She had changed nothing; she never did. The shutters were closed against the cold. She seemed to realize how hard he was trying to hold himself in place, because she only touched his sleeve lightly to urge him toward her little table. He didn’t sit; he didn’t think he could.
“You are the reason I come back here,” he said again. “I love this village and the people in it, but it’s you I think of when I’m gone, and it’s you I want to see first when I return. I wonder if you’re safe and happy. I wonder whether you found enough berries to make your favorite dye, or if your roof has started to leak again. I wonder if you have found someone who makes you happy. If you have decided to spend your life with them.
“But I have hesitated to tell you all of this. Not only because I didn’t want to burden you with it, but because my life is not my own. I already share it with another, and this other can be . . . jealous.”
She examined him closely, her eyes sharp, knowing. “Death,” she said.
He wasn’t surprised that she had guessed. It was in his name, after all. “Yes. Death is my parent, my sibling, my only friend. I am Death’s companion. I am afraid what would happen if—”
“I am not afraid,” Hilda said, resting her hand again on his cheek. Her palm was warm against his chilled skin. “I know Death, too. I visit Death often in the forest. I’m here to protect this village, so don’t you worry about the people here, or about me. I may fear warts, and spiders, and children, but I do not fear Death.”
The doctor was shaking, he wanted her so badly. “I can’t always be with you. I wouldn’t abandon my patients, and I must still spend time with Death. I can’t promise how long I’ll be gone. I can’t provide for you or protect you the way another would. Despite all that, you would still have me?”
Smiling, she kissed him, and put her arms around him, and held him tight.
“I have never felt this way for anyone else,” she said. “All the rest is detail.”
Four
They kept their relationship a secret. It would have been difficult if Hilda had not been able to wrap them both in her magic, one of the few times she ever used it for anything other than protecting the village. He didn’t know how she did it, and he didn’t ask. They did not lie to each other, but they did have secrets, and he thought this was good. He didn’t need to know how she protected them; that was something she had learned from her mother, that her mother had learned from her grandmother, and on and on.
Every time he came back to Greymist Fair, the doctor rented his usual room in the inn, saw his patients, then went to Hilda. The time they spent together was consumed by touch, quiet conversations, the deepest, most restful sleep he had ever had, and the feeling that he was where he belonged. When he left, his memories of Hilda and her little cottage were cast in a golden light. On his travels, his most frequent thought was, I cannot wait to go home.
“I’ve never had a home before,” he told Hilda the next winter, when they were twined together in her bed beneath furs he’d bought from Gottfried, and a fire crackled merrily in the hearth. “I have places I’ve been and places I’m going, but never a place of my own.”
“Then this is yours,” she said, kissing the end of his long and crooked nose. “Everyone deserves a home.”
But the doctor could not go home as often as he liked; the more he visited Greymist Fair and the longer he disappeared into Hilda’s cottage, the more withdrawn Death became. The doctor could sense Death’s displeasure, but he didn’t know that Hilda’s magic was working against Death, too, until one summer afternoon while they walked together down a long and empty road, Death said to the doctor, “You have found something in that village. Someone else who will take you away from me.”
“Of course not,” said the doctor, flattening his hand nervously over the linden bloom inside his coat. “I only like it there because it’s peaceful.”
“Lots of villages are peaceful,” said Death, but let the subject drop.
The doctor was wise enough by now to know that Hilda could protect herself from Death, but it didn’t stop him from worrying. The worry was small, though, and easily bested while he was traveling, while he could convince Death that there was no relationship in his life more important than the companionship they shared. It wasn’t all lies; he did care for Death, and he understood Death’s loneliness. He wanted to share with Death this love he had found, but he couldn’t. Death would hate him for it. It was a burden he hadn’t expected.
Then, after two years of secret keeping, the burden got heavier.
Luther returned from several months of travel, rented his room, and went to see his patients, and while he was examining one of the innkeepers, she said happily, “Have you been to see Hilda yet? You may not have heard, though it’s been the talk of the village for the last month . . . No one knows who the father is—”
He didn’t wait for her to finish. He was out of the inn, up the hill, and throwing the cottage door open before he could stop himself. Hilda jumped up from where she sat at her loom, threads in all shades of gold falling, and spun to face him. There was the pause, there was the dawning recognition, there was her smile.
She wore a loose dress, and her stomach swelled beneath it.
He cut his stay in the village short that time so that he could travel his rounds and be back in time for the birth. “You have to go,” Hilda had told him when he insisted that he stay. “Death will get even more suspicious if you stay for that many months. Go now, and you’ll be here when she’s born.”
So he left, his nerves frayed, and when he came back it was the height of summer. He waited outside the cottage while the midwife was inside with Hilda; the only reason he could even be there without raising suspicion was because he was Doctor Death, and he might be needed. He listened to Hilda’s cries of pain and dug crescent moons into his palms with his nails. Suddenly he had a vision of entering the cottage and seeing Death standing at the end of Hilda’s bed, black eyes blazing with the knowledge of their deceit, and both Hilda and the child lifeless in Death’s shadow.
Another cry came through the open window. His daughter lived.
“Henrike,” said Hilda, watching Luther hold the baby carefully along one forearm after the midwife had gone. “We’ll call her Heike, for short.”
“Little Heike,” whispered the doctor. Little Heike slept, her round cheeks fuzzed like peaches and her eyelids almost translucent. He could feel her mother’s magic in her. “I have never seen anything so beautiful.”
“Neither have I,” said Hilda. But even as she smiled, lines of worry tightened around her eyes and mouth. Later, when the doctor forced himself to think of reality again, he knew what he had done to them. He could never truly be a father to his daughter, not while Death watched him so jealously. And she could never know who he was, lest she let slip the secret. It was too dangerous.
He lay in bed with Hilda, their bodies curved around Heike’s small sleeping form, the room dark and the moon large in the sky outside the window.
“I told you once I didn’t fear Death,” she said, her voice hardly a whisper. “I realized it’s not true anymore. I do fear Death. I fear her death. I fear mine, because if I’m not here, who will take care of her? Who will teach her about her magic, and what she needs to survive? I always thought my biggest fear would be not knowing what to do with a child, how to take care of one, but this is so much bigger. I’m so afraid. I feel like I’ll be afraid forever.”
He found her hand in the darkness and brought it to his chest. “I will do everything in my power to keep her safe. To keep you both safe.”
What he wanted to say was, I’m afraid, too. But he couldn’t; to voice it was to admit it to himself. He could not allow himself to be afraid of Death. This was his duty, now. He had a home to protect, and he would protect it.
Five
Luther could not be a father to Heike in the way she deserved, but he at least got to see her grow. And she grew quickly, as children do; he would leave and return and suddenly she was bigger, she was walking, she could speak. The mystery of the identity of her father lingered on in the village, but luckily, she had all her mother’s features, except for her nose. Her nose was his, long and crooked.
Hilda kept a diary for him of Heike’s days, when she spoke her first word, her first scraped knee, which foods she liked best. When Heike was still too young to remember him or understand what they were saying, he would sit with her in his lap in the cottage while Hilda read him the entries. Heike would grab at his fingers with her small pudgy hands. He would tell her how much he loved her, and as she grew closer to an age where there was a chance she would remember him, he would hug her close and cry.
He knew that time had come when Hilda sent Heike outside to play when he returned to Greymist Fair and showed up at the door.
“She asked me who her father is,” Hilda said, peering out the window, where Heike was barreling down the hill to greet the little boy that had been adopted by the innkeepers. “I told her he’s a good man, and he loves her very much.”
“Does she believe you?” the doctor asked.
“I don’t know.” She turned away from the window to look at him. “Has Death noticed anything?”
“No. I made sure of that.”
When the doctor was away from Greymist Fair, the energy not devoted to his patients was used convincing Death that there was nothing more important in the world to him than the bond they shared. Death, always so eager to banish loneliness, swallowed it whole. Gone was the withdrawal, the suspicion. Death was happy; Heike was safe.
Heike learned how to sew, like her mother. She wove magic into everything she made, though she didn’t know it. She was good friends with the innkeepers’ adopted boy, Wenzel, who asked Luther for stories of his travels. When Heike wasn’t learning or doing chores, she was with Wenzel. He was one of the few people in town who would play with her.
Hilda’s so-called involvement with the witch of the forest had caused the villagers to be wary of Heike as well. When her exclusion bothered him too much, he reminded himself how much worse it would be if people knew Doctor Death was her father. They valued his skills and his ability to help them, but they could sense what he was and where he came from.
When Heike was nine and Doctor Death came to the cottage to give her stitches, she regarded him with a new, thinly veiled distrust. With no preamble, she said, “Why do you look at my mother that way?”
It was a sharp question, demanding. She was a small Hilda, and his nose on her face couldn’t do anything to dull the impression. “Look at her what way?” he asked, pretending not to understand.
Heike didn’t seem to have words to answer him, because she screwed up her face and said, “You smell like . . . like winter, and dead things. You’re not right, and you shouldn’t look at her that way!”
“Henrike!” Hilda snapped, and the girl’s temper fled in the presence of her mother’s. “Apologize, now!”
“I won’t.” Heike wormed out of her chair, slipped around the doctor, and ran to the door. “I don’t like him, and I don’t want him here.”
He thought she would run out then and console herself outdoors, but she pushed open the door and stood by it, staring at him, waiting. Her anger had been quelled, but not her sense of duty.
“Henrike!” Hilda’s tone was dangerous, but Heike didn’t move.
“I’ll go,” said the doctor quietly, and he looked at neither Hilda’s face nor Heike’s as he gathered his things and left.
Hilda found him at the inn later and apologized—“She just doesn’t know . . . she’s so protective . . . she thinks someone will take me away from her”—but she didn’t have to. The doctor had spent enough time with jealous Death to understand. And now that Heike was getting older, loving her mother as much as she did, their world was closing its doors to him. His sun-dappled memories of the years he’d spent with Hilda in the home they’d made together began to fade.
When he left Greymist Fair after that visit, Death was in high spirits.
Death could be in many places at once, as was the nature of their being, but the doctor noticed their absence the moment he entered the forest heading toward Greymist Fair, and he did not see Death until a week later, when he had left the village again and exited the forest on the far side. Heike was fourteen now, a gangly girl who was already taller than her mother, and she kept a good distance between herself and the doctor, though Hilda said she had forgotten her dislike for him. It made him feel even more out of sorts, and he had felt like that often these days.
“You must be careful.” Death appeared at the doctor’s side, gliding along on the shadows cast by the blue-flame lanterns. “There is a witch in that village, and if she learns of your relation to me, she will kill you.”
“Witch?” the doctor said, trying to keep his face emotionless.
“The tailor,” said Death. “She visits my home in the forest to ensnare me, to keep me from entering the village in person. She thinks I should be alone, that I should have no companionship. She thinks I am not worthy of it.”
“You do kill the people who enter the forest,” the doctor pointed out.
“Only because they fear me!” Death’s placid expression twisted in fury. Needle teeth flashed against thin, pallid lips. Black eyes became empty pits. “If they did not fear me, I would have companionship, and none would have to die save for illness, injury, and age. I would not have to twist the wargs to my service. It is her fault, the witch! She poisons the town with her fear! But I see it in her . . . I’ve seen that same fear. I’ve seen that daughter of hers. When she came to see me this time, I knew she feared me, but I couldn’t catch her.”
The doctor’s heart pounded in his chest. He had to remind himself that he had just seen Hilda in the village; she was alive and well. “What do you mean? She outran you?”
“She put magic in her boots,” Death said. “And she ran for home. Only that allowed her to escape from me. But I am waiting for her, and it’s only a matter of time. You must be careful in the village. Don’t let her know who you are. She will kill you.”
The doctor clenched his hand at his side to stop himself from putting it over his heart, where he always kept the sprig of linden in his inner pocket. Being apart from Hilda was bad enough; knowing she had been in such danger, that she could be in danger again, was worse.
Death continued to complain about the witch of Greymist Fair, and the doctor allowed it. For while Death was angry about her, Hilda was still alive.
I am waiting for her, and it’s only a matter of time.
The time was two years. The doctor had been away from Greymist Fair for almost ten months, one of his longer trips, and he returned to news that made the world slide away from him.
Two of the village children, the butcher’s boy and Lord Greymist’s own daughter, had gone into the forest to find the witch. Hilda had followed to stop them. The boy had gotten out—that one was too self-important to fear Death, the doctor thought—but the girl, Katrina, had been killed by the wargs. Lady Greymist, distraught, had taken ill and not recovered. Now the once hale and hearty Lord Greymist was dying as well, and the village was in mourning.
Katrina had left no remains save her shoes and some scraps of her dress. That was the fate of all innocents who died in the forest and in Greymist Fair; they became wargs themselves.
So they assumed that was also what had happened to Hilda.
Delirious, the world shrinking around him, the doctor managed to ask only one question. He directed it at Wenzel, who had recounted the story, and who had taken over the inn after the old innkeepers passed away.
“The shoes they found,” the doctor said, “were they her boots, the ones with the long laces and the ribbons she liked to wind through them?”
“Oh no,” said Wenzel. “She was wearing an older pair while she made a second set for herself. She gave the ones with the ribbons to Heike.”
Of course you did, the doctor thought. He kept thinking it as he went up to his room, put his face in his hands, and began laughing and crying at the same time.
Of course you did, and now Heike has no one, because you are gone and I can never claim her.
Death never said a thing about finally besting the witch of Greymist Fair. The doctor wondered if it hadn’t been as sweet a victory as Death had hoped after all.
Six
Doctor Death stayed away from the village for a long time after that, figuring Heike would be safer if he returned only rarely and did not interact with her. He suffered bouts of fancy now and then, thinking that if he wandered into the forest he might be able to find Hilda. He knew he would love her spirit even in the body of a warg. But it was all make-believe. When he returned to reality, he carried on with his business. He saw his patients; he saw Death at the foot of many beds; he did what he could and helped where he was able.
When he finally returned to Greymist Fair again, he had forgotten how many years had passed. It was late fall, the cusp of winter. Wenzel was a fine young man, happy and welcoming, and he remembered what the doctor liked for breakfast and how he took his tea, and he still asked for stories from afar. He was writing a storybook, he said.
As the doctor was sitting down for his toast and jam, the door opened, and Heike came in. She looked so much like Hilda that for a moment the doctor’s heart was wrenched from his chest in disbelief, and he nearly shoved himself up from the table and called her name. Then his mind caught up to him. His daughter—his daughter, it was strange to call her that now, because she seemed so much her own woman, and he had played so little a role in her upbringing—was standing by the stairs with an empty berry basket and flirting with Wenzel about strange things happening across the Idle River Bridge.
