“I’m a child!” I protested. “Iwasa child. I was…” I shook my head, unsure what category I fell into. I’d been relying on myself for years.Didthat make me an adult? I didn’t feel like one. I didn’t feel like much of anything most days, and in this moment, I felt like even less. It hurt to speak, hurt to hold myself together. Without care, I threw myself at him, hiding away in the fullness of his robe. I felt his figure beneath the swell of fabric, but it was too gaunt, too wrong, too full of angles my mind couldn’t wrap around, juts from bones my mortal frame did not possess. For a god so suffused with power beyond reason, his actual body did not take up very much space.
After a brief hesitation, Merrick folded his arms around me, holding on as I released my torrent of woe upon him. He patted my shoulders, then my head, eventually deciding to stroke my hair, saying nothing as I wept but making a soft, low noise of comfort.
I don’t know how long we stayed like that, but eventually the tears trickled themselves out and I sat up, stretching my shoulder blades. I wiped the back of my hand over my face, shame burning across my cheeks. I couldn’t guess what he thought of my outburst, what he was thinking of me.
Merrick watched on, the apprehension written across his face as obvious as a splatter of blood on surgical linens.
“I’m sorry,” I said, struggling to put myself back together. “I didn’t mean…I didn’t mean to…” I stopped, unsure of exactly what I didn’t mean to. I had needed that, but more importantly,he’dneeded to see that, needed to hear my frustrations, needed to know how much his absence had undone me.
Merrick cleared his throat and it sounded like the wispy rasp of insect wings rubbing against each other. “I ought to be apologizing to you, Hazel. I didn’t…I never would have dreamed you’d need me to stay, that you’d even want me here.”
It would take me years to realize that for all his talk of remorse, he never actually did say the wordsorry.
“You’re my godfather,” I protested. “You’re my family—the closest thing I have to one now.”
He tilted his head, pondering me. His eyes seemed more luminous than usual and glassy bright, as if he might be on the verge of tears too. “Family,” he said, holding out his hand.
I placed mine in its center and when his long fingers folded closed, dwarfing mine, it felt oddly formal, as if we were concluding a business transaction. Impulsively, I threw my arms around him in a desperate embrace. I wasn’t crying now, grasping at any comfortIcould find. I wantedhimto feel how earnestly I needed him, this odd father figure I’d been promised. I wanted him to need me as badly as I did him.
He hugged me back and my ears were filled with the rushing sound of a sudden wind. It roared all around us, a hurricane of motion, whipping my hair and animating Merrick’s robes in a flurry of ripples.
He broke the embrace first, stepping back and giving me the space to find my sense of equilibrium. My ears ached, and for a second, I thought I wasn’t in the right space. My cottage didn’t lookthe way it should. The room skewed too long, too wide. All the furniture was in the wrong place.
I blinked against the vision and rubbed my eyes, certain the wind had kicked some grit into them. If I could just get it out, thecottage would return to normal.
But I did and it didn’t.
I stepped away from Merrick, turning to look about with open wonder.
It wasn’t that the furniture was in the wrong place…it was entirely different furniture. In an entirely different room.
“Where…where are we?” I asked, whirling around to Merrick.
His mouth rose in a smile. “Home.”
Chapter 13
I ran to the windowand let out a noise of surprise. The orchard with Merrick’s soaring, fantastical trees was gone. In its place were other trees, beech and alder, cypress and yew. After a year spent in the Between, their ordinariness was almost shocking.
I turned back to the cottage, surprised to find doorways leading to other rooms. This house was much larger than my old one, with high rafters and beams. I could already picture how they’d look at harvest time, with bunches of drying flowers and herbs hanging from them. Everything was airy and light. Beams of sunshine danced through the many open windows. Eyelet curtains wafted back and forth, caught in the breeze. I took in a deep breath. The air was redolent with the scent of freshly turned earth, bursting blossoms, and a heady mix of so many green growing things. There had not been scents like this in the Between; there’d not been any scents at all. My senses tingled, as though this wealth of input was overwhelming them, like fireworks blasting through my bloodstream.
“What do you think?” Merrick asked, clasping his fingerstogether. I could tell he was worried that he’d gotten it all wrong, that the cottage wasn’t to my taste, that I hated everything in it and, by extension, him as well.
I wandered to the next room. One wall was lined with diamond-paned windows. Its opposite was all shelves, already full of books. My fingers trailed over their spines and I spotted many new titles among old friends. History and science, atlases and art, novels and poetry.
“Hazel?” he called again, wandering after me. I noticed he left a careful distance between us.
The kitchen came next. The cabinets were painted white and stenciled with tiny blue flowers. There were pots and pans of bright copper, a dark wooden ice chest, and a huge, hulking iron stove in the corner. There was a worktable and stools, a row of potted herbs lining the deep windowsill, and enough plates and cups to host a party of six.
I wandered through each open door, passing a mudroom and pantry, a cozy sitting room, and an indoor bathroom so beautiful I actually gasped, until I arrived at the bedroom.
It was so green.
Windows lined three walls, offering a dazzling view of the surrounding forest and fields of waving tall grasses.
He gave me trees.
I turned around. Merrick had hung back on the room’s threshold, bending low to fit in the doorframe.
