“Lots of villages are peaceful,” said Death, but let the subject drop.
The doctor was wise enough by now to know that Hildacould 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, herround 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 fearherdeath. 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. Shewasa 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!”
