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The earth knew her moods.
When Amy laughed, the flowers bloomed. When she was sad, the grass wilted. And when she was annoyed, the rosebushes put out thorns.
Right now, the rosebushes have thorns.
“You’re early,” she said, without turning around.
She had sensed her husband’s arrival the way she always did: a drop in temperature, a hush that fell over the birdsong, a sudden darkness as if a cloud had passed over the sun.
“I’m aware,” Shadow said.
“Three weeks early.” She turned then, and the afternoon light caught her all at once.
Her pink quills fell long past her shoulders, lifting slightly in the warm breeze. Atop her head was a crown of white peonies. She wore a dress that seemed almost to have grown rather than been made: layers and layers of rose petals, rustling with each movement as though they still remembered being alive. She also had her gardening gloves on, which meant she had been in the middle of something and was definitely irritated that she’d been interrupted.
Shadow looked, as he always did, like someone who had never known what it meant to live—because, technically, he didn’t. Dark as a new moon, an expression that made him look perpetually grumpy, and dressed in black, the long lines of his coat a sharp contrast against the bright light of the late summer sun. Pinned over his heart, half-hidden beneath the lapel of his coat, was a red rose.
Green eyes sharp, Amy squared her shoulders. “Shadow, we have an arrangement.”
“We do.”
“The arrangement says the first day of autumn.”
“It does.”
“It’s still summer.”
“It is.”
She stared at him. He looked past her, rather than directly at her, though it was subtle enough that most wouldn’t notice. This was, Amy had come to understand over their centuries together, his version of being sheepish.
“Why?” she asked.
A pause. The meadow held its breath. Even the flowers seemed to lean in slightly.
“I missed you,” Shadow said.
Amy opened her mouth. Closed it. Pulled off her gardening gloves with more force than was necessary and tossed them to the ground, which sent a small shower of soil into the air and startled a nearby chipmunk. The chipmunk shot Shadow a disapproving look as it fled. Shadow did not acknowledge it.
“You missed me,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“You. The God of the Underworld. Lord of the Dead, Keeper of Souls, He Who Rules the Eternal Dark—”
“I don’t actually use that last title.”
“—missed me.” She crossed her arms. “So you just decided to show up three weeks early and throw the whole seasonal calendar into chaos.”
“Twenty-one days isn’t chaos. It’s an inconvenience.”
“It’s Blaze’s season, Shadow! She’s worked hard. She deserves to see it through, on the proper timeline.” Amy turned back to the rosebush. “You can’t just come collect me three weeks early because you got impatient. You’ll have to take it up with her.”
Shadow moved closer, measured, deliberate, as though the space between them was something to be respected before it was closed. She could feel the temperature drop very slightly, that particular chill that followed him everywhere.
“I’ve spoken to Silver.”
Amy blinked.
She turned around.
“He’s been patient long enough. They both have.” Shadow looked away, toward the far edge of the meadow where the trees were thickest. “If Blaze gives up the last three weeks of her season now, I’ll arrange for Silver to come to her during the transition. They’ll have time. Proper time. Not whatever stolen hours they usually manage.”
Blaze, the summer goddess, had loved Silver for longer than most mortals could comprehend. And Silver, the winter god, had loved her back just as long. But the world’s natural cycle did not allow for much overlap and opportunities to see each other.
“And how exactly does the Lord of the Underworld arrange a meeting between Summer and Winter?” Amy asked. “Their domains don’t touch”
“They touch in my territory,” Shadow said. “Nothing grows in the underworld unless I allow it to. No season governs it, because no season has ever needed to. Silver’s frost holds no power there, and neither does Blaze’s heat. It is the one place where both of them can simply exist without their domains warring against each other.” He paused. “I am offering neutral ground. Three weeks of it. They will not be Summer and Winter there. They will only be Blaze and Silver.”
“You’re going to lend them your borders.”
“I’m going to lend them my borders.” He paused. “It costs me something to hold a threshold open that long. It will be tiring. I didn’t say so to Silver, and you won’t either.”
Amy stared at him.
“You did that on purpose,” she said. “You structured this so they’d have time together.”
“I structured this so you could come to me sooner,” Shadow replied. “The arrangement for Silver and Blaze is a consequence.”
“A consequence you orchestrated because you have a soft spot for Silver.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not much. Just enough. “He tends to get a worse reputation than he deserves.”
“Mm.” Amy tilted her head. “I wonder who that reminds me of.”
Shadow didn’t answer that, which was its own kind of answer.
She thought about Silver, who presided over frost and snow and the long silence of winter, who was so often blamed for things that were simply nature’s course, who bore the weight of being the bringer of the season no one wanted to arrive.
There was a mutual recognition of sorts between him and Shadow. Two figures whose dominion over the harder, darker aspects of existence made them easy to view as villains.
It did not surprise Amy that Shadow had thought to do this for him and Blaze.
She was quiet for a long moment. Around them, the meadow buzzed and swayed. A butterfly drifted past Shadow’s shoulder. He watched it go with the particular expression he reserved for living things that moved without caution around him: not quite wonder, but something in the same neighborhood.
“Okay,” Amy said finally.
Shadow looked back at her.
“I’ll talk to Blaze.” She bent down and retrieved her gardening gloves from the ground, brushing the soil from them. “She’ll be annoyed, but when I tell her about Silver, she’ll come around.”
She stood, gloves in hand, and studied Shadow properly for the first time since he’d arrived.
The dark circles under his eyes seemed deeper than usual.
She had seen that look before. She saw it every autumn, when she first returned to him, and it always took a few weeks for it to ease.
“How long has it been feeling long?” she asked.
“Since the solstice.”
She closed the remaining distance between them. The temperature dropped another degree or two as she approached. His presence was not designed for warmth, and proximity only made that more apparent. She had learned to stop noticing it.
“It would go faster if you rested.”
“I don’t rest.”
“I know.” She smoothed down the lapel of his coat, fingers brushing past the rose. “I’m saying it anyway, because someone should.”
Shadow’s hand came up and covered hers.
“What did you have planned for when I got there?” Amy asked.
“Nothing in particular.”
“Liar.”
The corner of his mouth twitched barely. “I thought you might want to see the garden.”
Amy felt her heart warm in her chest. She had planted that garden in their earliest years together, in what had been an act of homesickness. She had brought seeds down into the underworld and planted them in soil that had never seen the sun, and miraculously, they had grown. Though she had since come to understand there was nothing miraculous about it at all. Nothing grew there without her husband’s permission. He simply hadn’t told her he’d given it.
He had tended to it, she knew, in the months she was away.
Amy withdrew her hand. “Well, let’s go upset Blaze.”
The corner of Shadow’s mouth moved upward again.
An afternoon wind moved through the grass, warm and tinged with the end of something, as they walked. Summer releasing its grip the way seasons always did: not all at once, but in small surrenders, each one making room for what came next.
Ahead of them, the path wound toward Blaze’s territory.
Behind them, already, the first leaf had turned.