She’d meant them as a joke, but they were still wildly more comfortable than any he’d worn before.
They had islands of days in a sea of months when he was away traveling, and yet their time together stood out so brightly in his mind, it eclipsed the time they spent apart. They were not doctor and patient; they were friends and more than friends, although he didn’t know how to broach that topic with her. How could he explain his relationship with Death to her? How could he be with anyone when Death was always there, calling Luther to their side?
None of that stopped him from thinking, each time he went away, about how he would feel if he returned to the village and discovered she had married. If she was happy, he would be happy for her, but he would also mourn for himself. What he had with her, he had with no one else. Not even Death.
Eight months had passed since Luther’s last visit, and he had timed his return to coincide with the winter. He had never minded the winter; it was Death’s season, and so it was his season. But it did make travel difficult, and he thought the weather might help him in his quest to stay longer than usual.
The village was preparing for the holiday festivities. The smaller evergreens from the edge of the forest had been cut and brought into homes to ward off darkness; evergreen garlands decorated eaves and windows, and evergreen wreaths hung from doors, fences, and the iron lampposts. Red bursts of holly and mistletoe highlighted doorframes and windowpanes. Handbells rang through the morning, and the smell of fresh gingerbread wafted from the bakery.
After settling in his room in the inn, the first thing the doctor did was ask after Hilda. She still lived in the cottage beneath the linden tree, and with some deft conversational maneuvering with the innkeepers, he found out she still lived there alone. He gathered a few bunches of holly with their bright red berries standing out against the snow, then a handful of snowdrops from around the side of the inn, where they grew in riots. He spent a moment arranging his little bouquet, then tied thered ribbon he’d brought from one of the great cities around the stems and finished it off with a bow.
He’d been practicing what he would say for months, and now, climbing the hill to her cottage, he disliked all of it. It all sounded rehearsed, wooden; he felt like a raggedy scarecrow with a bunch of weeds on his way to ask a beautiful maiden to consider him. Surely she had better prospects in the village. Someone good and respectable, who could settle with her and take care of her and who shared her understanding of the place they lived.
He could hear the clack of knitting needles and the crackle of fire on the other side of the door. She was in a good mood when she was knitting; knitting meant relaxing. The doctor breathed in, knocked three times, and waited. The clacking stopped. Soft footsteps approached the door. It swung open, letting out a puff of warm air.
There was a moment when her expression was open, blank, the moment before she recognized him. Watching the recognition hit her face was like watching the sun rise. Before he could say a word, her arms were around his neck, her body flush against his, the smell of dyes and wool heavy in his nose. They embraced tightly, teetering on the doorstep, until Hilda finally released him and took his face in her hands. Her smile was radiant. His handssettled on her waist, one still holding the bouquet.
“Where have you been?” she asked, straightening his hair with a flick of her fingers. “You were gone so long this time, I thought you weren’t coming back.”
His heart felt huge in his chest. He didn’t think he could speak without choking. So much of his focus was going toward not holding her too tightly, not crushing her against him and never letting go. He handed her the bouquet.
“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. Iwonder 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 Imust 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 mostfrequent 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.”
