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, thedoor 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—hisdaughter, 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.
She left again without so much as a glance his way. That was as it should be, but his appetite was gone.
When she returned later that day with a report of a murder on the road—not in the forest, buton the road—he knew that something had stirred Death. The villagers thought it was the witch, but the villagers also thought the witch controlled the wargs. He could not tell them the truth, nor could he tell Heike the truth when she volunteered to go into the forest. Not because he thought telling her the truth would put her in any greater danger than walking right up to Death’s doorstep, but because he didn’t want to. She had her mother’s training; she had her mother’s boots. He didn’t blame her for her mother’s death—he was no longer so depraved as that—but he didn’t think there was anything he could say or do that would stop her.She had her mother’s sense of duty as well.
He did catch her before she left, though. He met Heike, Wenzel, and Ulrich behind the inn, and Heike watched him with those wary gold eyes.
“Head northwest,” he told her, remembering what Hilda had once told him of her excursions into the forest. “If you reach the bend of the Idle River, you’ve gone too far.”
“You know where the house is?” Heike asked.
Hearing her speak directly to him was a brush of warmth on his long-numbed heart, and he found it difficult to reply. He reached into one of his pockets and pulled out a small leather pouch he kept packed with sage. He removed a dried bunch and gave it to her.
“Keep this with you. In a pocket where it won’t fall out. Not in your bag. You might lose that.”
It wouldn’t invoke Death’s wrath if it was found, but it might offer her some protection.
She tucked it away and said, “Thank you.”
“Safe journey,” he said, hearing his voice shake, feeling his whole body shake. He swallowed thickly and said, “Your mother prepared you well.”
For the rest of the afternoon and evening, he sat in his room and worried, thinking of all the ways he could better help Heike,all the things he could be doing for her, all the things he could have told her. For much of that time, he thought,You should have told her, you coward.And the rest of the time, he thought,You can’t protect her forever.
The doctor didn’t stop worrying even after she came back. He didn’t stop worrying when Jürgen the butcher turned up dead in the well, and a ragged batch of children was freed from beneath his house. The doctor didn’t stop worrying when elk stampeded through the village, when the weather turned for the worse, or when, without warning, Jürgen’s son, Hans, was suddenly the king, and a castle had grown out of Greymist Manor. None of the villagers seemed to realize that this reality had not always been their reality, and it was over only a few hours after it began, like a very strange dream.
It was not a dream when Heike was brought to the inn. He had carried her up to a room, and as soon as she was put on the bed, he made everyone—the fisherman’s boy and his friend, Wenzel, and Ulrich—get out. Because Death was standing at the end of the bed, looking down on Heike.
Shewasdying, and the doctor guessed it had something to do with the magic that had been required to strip the boy king of his power and return the village to normal. He could see thecolor draining from her face, like an oil lamp inside her was being slowly turned down. Her light would be snuffed out, and soon.
He looked at her. He looked at Death. No medical treatment would bring her back now. No amount of wishes or prayers. He knew this. He had been through it enough times with others. But Heike wasn’tothers, and all those places he’d been weren’t his home.
He reached into his coat pocket, the one over his heart, and drew out the sprig of linden blooms, as fresh and yellow as the day they had been tucked into his swaddling blanket. Death’s gaze was drawn to them.
“What are you doing?” Death asked.
The doctor placed the linden bloom over Heike’s heart and folded her hands atop it. Right away, the blue tips of her fingers turned pink again. Color filled her cheeks. Her breathing slowed and evened.
Death stared at the doctor, incredulous. “You choose her over me? What has she given you that I haven’t?”
“It isn’t you or her,” said the doctor. “You’ve never understood. People fear you because you force them to choose you at the exclusion of all others. If you continue that way, you will always be alone. I love you and what you have done forme, but I have loved others, too, and my love for them did not diminish my love for you. It only hindered it, because I couldn’t share them with you, or you with them.”
“But... how could you love her? She’s the witch’s daughter. The witch who kept me from my home...” Death looked betrayed.
“Her name was Hilda. You would have terrorized this village if she hadn’t protected them from you. Neither she nor her daughter deserved your wrath.”
Death paused, dark eyes scanning the doctor’s face. “You loved her.”
“Yes.”
“And this girl...” Death looked down at Heike.
“She’s my daughter.”
The doctor had known giving Heike the linden sprig was the last thing he would ever do. He would never have parted with it for anyone else, except Hilda.
Death appeared before the doctor, and when the doctor looked down, he saw Death’s arm buried in his chest, and he felt Death’s hand locked around his heart. Death was crying. The doctor felt only a strange sensation of floating.
