“You must leave,” said a cracked voice behind them. “You must go.”
Behind them stood a liveried servant of the house, small, sallow-skinned, and frizzy-haired. He had greeted them all upon arriving at the ball, had gifted their sister with a poppy to wear. Käthe remembered him, so starkly different from the other footmen whose features blended into each other’s, utterly indistinguishable despite their bare faces.
“Beg pardon?” she asked.
“You must leave,” the footman repeated. “You are not safe.”
“But Josef—Liesl—” François began, but the servant shook his head.
“It is not their lives that are in danger; it is yours.” His pinched and sallow face was grim. “Come, follow me, meine Dame und Herr. We must get you someplace secure.”
“What are on earth are you talking about?” Käthe snapped. Fear and anxiety made her short-tempered. “What about my brother and sister? Why should we trust you?”
The footman’s dark eyes were grave. “Your brother and sister are long gone,” he said. “And beyond your help.”
Käthe’s brows lifted in alarm. “You haven’t harmed them!”
“No, Fräulein.” He shook his head. “They are with the Count and Countess. Their well-being is no longer your most pressing concern.”
François looked bewildered, eyes darting from the fair-haired girl on one side and the beetling servant on the other. “Käthe,” he said, “qu’est-ce que c’est . . . ?”
She narrowed her eyes at the footman. “Who are you?”
“I am no one,” he answered softly. “A friend. Now hurry, we must get you back inside lest the Hunt return.”
“The Hunt?” François asked.
Käthe paled. “The unholy host?”
The footman turned to her in surprise. “You believe? You have faith?”
She set her lips in a tight line. “I have faith in my sister. She believes in the old stories.”
He nodded his head. “Then have faith in the old stories, if you will not have faith in me. All the tales are true, and believe me when I say that you are not safe here.”
Käthe looked to the bodies of the lovers at her feet. Their eyes were open, staring at the night sky. What sights had they seen before they died? Had they taken ghostly scraps of rotting fabric for wisps of mist? The dull gleam of rusted armor for moonlight upon stone? Had they not believed? Was this why their lives were lost?
“All right,” she said. “Where are you taking us?”
“Home, Fräulein,” the footman said. “Where the Faithful can watch over you.”
She did not think he was referring to their apartments near Stephansplatz. Käthe turned to François. If neither were fluent in each other’s tongue, then they shared a language down to their bones nonetheless. The language of trust, and of faith in their loved ones. After a moment, François nodded and offered his arm to Käthe.
“Mademoiselle,” he said with a bow.
She took his arm with a nod and faced the footman.
“Lead on, Herr . . . ?”
The footman grinned, showing row upon row of crooked, yellow teeth. “You may call me Bramble.” He laughed at their confused expressions. “It was what the villagers called me when I was a babe, found abandoned and tangled in a blackberry bramble.”
“Ah.” Käthe was embarrassed.
The edges of Bramble’s smile twisted, turning sinister, sad. “It’s all right, Fräulein. I am one of the lucky ones. They gave me a name. And a soul.”
François knitted his brow. “A soul?”
“Aye, Herr Darkling,” Bramble said. “A changeling has no name and no one to call him home. But I do. I do.”
EVER OURS
Can our love persist otherwise than through sacrifices, than by not demanding everything?
— LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, the Immortal Beloved letters
SNOVIN HALL
the Procházka family estate was a shambles.
If I had thought their home in the environs of Vienna had been odd, it was nothing compared to Snovin Hall, the majestic, tumbledown manor that was the seat of their house. We had driven through the night on the evening of our flight from the city, stopping only to change horses. We slept on the road, ate on the road, and drank on the road, leaving no time to catch our bearings.
Or write a letter.
“Why such haste?” I had asked the Countess. “Surely men and women of your stature could afford more luxurious accommodations and modes of travel.”
“Oh, Otto detests traveling,” she replied. “The food disagrees with him, poor lamb.”
It was true the Count seemed to be a pampered, petted creature, but I couldn’t help but suspect that the Procházkas had other reasons for speed. No time for Josef or me to speak to anyone at a tavern or inn, no opportunity to pass along a message or a note to my sister and François, no chance to . . . escape.
We spoke little on the journey, preferring to doze or watch the surroundings change. The countryside grew colder the farther from the city we drew. The smells and scents of human habitation, barnyard stock, churned mud and trampled hay and woodsmoke gave way to sharp pine, wet stone, deep loam, and dark spaces. Farmlands eventually began to grow more mountainous, more forested, more like . . . home.
Despite my distrust of the Procházkas, I felt a lightening in my chest the closer we drew to Snovin, as though I were letting go of a breath I’d been holding ever since I left Bavaria. Although my brother had kept mostly mum our entire carriage ride, I sensed that he, too, had been waiting to exhale. The quality of his silence shifted as we approached our destination, taking on a waiting, listening quality. Before he had been a fortress, a castle, a burg, but now there was a door in the wall. It could be opened, when the time was right.
Bits of snow drifted lazily like ash, settling on the road as we crested the hill and began our descent into the valley. As the path opened up before us, I gasped as the vista came into view.
Spindly turrets and towers of what appeared to be an ancient castle rose out of the earth like stony fingers reaching toward the sky. A forest encircled the house like a crown of thorns, a tangle of bare branches and the colorless gray-brown of sleeping green studded with gemstones of granite, while waiting clouds heavy with snow rested atop the hills in the distance. Twin waves of homesickness and homecoming overcame me at once, and a queer emotion floated in my chest, as though my heart had become unmoored from my ribs. There was something familiar about the sight before me. It wasn’t the forests or the hills or the dark unknown that was both similar to and dissimilar from the woods around Bavaria where I had grown up; it was the sense that I had seen this exact landscape before, although I could not remember where.
“Beautiful,” Josef murmured. I gave him a quick, sidelong glance; it was the first word he had said in days.
The Count beamed. “Isn’t it? The castle has been in my family for over a thousand years. Each generation of Procházkas has added to or subtracted from the original foundations, so hardly a single stone from the old building remains. Unusual and one of a kind, but not everyone appreciates its unique beauty as you do, young man.”
I did not think it was the castle my brother found beautiful, but the Count was right; the old castle was indeed one of a kind. I thought of the burg I had seen represented on the Procházka crest, but this castle seemed less like a fortress and more like a wattle-and-daub cottage made of borrowed bits from bigger, better buildings. The crenellations and parapets undulated along uneven slopes like the spine of a sleeping dragon, the manor towers and turrets were thrust out at tipsy angles, and gables jutted forth in unexpected places. Yet despite its oddities, there was a picturesque charm about it: a wild, untamed house for a wild, untamed landscape.
“What is that?” Josef pointed across the valley to a large building set into the hills before us, a crumbling ruin looking down upon us like a priest sneering down his nose at the populace.
“That is the old monastery,” s
aid the Count. “It belonged to the order of St. Benedict before it was destroyed several hundred years ago. It’s been empty ever since.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“It burned down in a fire.”
As we drew closer, I could see scorch marks painted onto the stones, traces of oily black tears streaming from hollow-eyed windows. “What caused the fire?”
He shrugged. “No one knows. There are stories, of course. There are accounts there was a lightning storm of biblical proportions the night it burned down. Still others say that the ghost of a restless wolf-spirit started it. More likely than not”—he shrugged—“some poor hapless monk fell asleep at his desk while transcribing something and knocked his candle over.”
“Wolf-spirit?” Josef asked.
“There have been tales of spectral wolves and hounds in these parts for as long as I can remember,” the Count said. “The villagers still speak of D’ábel, a monstrous beast with two different-colored eyes like the Devil.”
His eyes fell to the ring on my finger, two mismatched gems winking from a wolf’s silver face. Without thinking, I quickly moved to cover it, not thinking how that gesture would betray its importance to my . . . hosts? Benefactors? Captors?
“An interesting piece of jewelry you have there, Fräulein,” he remarked. He and his wife exchanged glances. “May I see it?”
“I—I . . .” I did not know what to say, or how to decline without calling more attention to it. I myself didn’t want to think too hard about how it had been returned to me. “It—it does not belong to me,” I finished. “It is not mine to share.”
“Curious,” the Countess said. “Is it so precious that you must guard it with your own life?”
I looked down at the ring, scuffed and tarnished with age. The mismatched gemstones—one blue, one green—were small, hardly enough to be considered worth much. Yet whatever its value, it was worth infinitely more to me. I thought of the dream—vision?—I had of the Goblin King, of the shadows crawling over his skin, the crown of horns growing from his head, and remembered his vow.
“One cannot place a price on a promise,” I said shortly. “And that is all I will speak of the matter.”
I felt Josef’s eyes upon me then, a questioning touch. It was the first hint of interest—of engagement—I had felt from my brother in a long time.
“Strange, what weight we place on such trinkets,” the Countess murmured. “What meaning we imbue our possessions. The ring is but a bit of silver, wrought in an unusual shape. Yet it is more than a piece of jewelry. A symbol? A key?”
I said nothing and turned my head to gaze out the window. I watched darkness fall as the sun set behind the clouds, casting long shadows across the valley and across my heart.
* * *
By the time we pulled up the long gravel driveway to the manor house itself, night had fallen entirely, and a thin layer of snow had settled along the roads. The dark was oppressive in these parts, the sort of dense black that had depth and weight, familiar to those of us who had grown up in the wild. Our only source of light aside from the lantern hanging on its pole before our driver were twin torches blazing in the distance, held by two silhouetted figures waiting at the door for our arrival.
“Too late for supper, I suppose,” the Count grumbled. “I wanted some of Nina’s cabbage soup before bed.”
“I’m sure the housekeeper will feed you until your waistcoat pops tomorrow, dear,” said his wife.
“But I want it now,” he said petulantly.
“We’ll see if Nina can send us some trays after we turn down for the evening,” the Countess sighed. “I know you get cranky when you’re hungry. Apologies, children,” she said, turning to Josef and me, though it was too dark to see our faces inside the coach. “We shall have a proper dinner and introduction to Snovin tomorrow.”
“And why you’ve brought us here?” I asked.
I felt the touch of her green eyes on mine. “All shall be revealed. Tomorrow.”
The two torch-wielding silhouettes in the distance resolved themselves into the shapes of a man and a woman; one short, stout, and dumpling-faced, the other tall, thin, and craggy-cheeked. They opened the carriage door as the Count introduced them as Nina and Konrad, the housekeeper and seneschal of the estate.
“Nina will show you both to your rooms,” the Count told us. “Konrad will be along with your things.”
“What things?” I said shortly. We had fled Vienna so quickly, neither Josef nor I possessed anything beyond the clothes on our backs, my brother’s violin, and my portfolio of music scores.
He had the grace to look sheepish in the flickering light. “Ah, yes. Well, could you send for the tailor to take their measurements tomorrow, my love?” The Count turned to his wife instead of his housekeeper, and she looked displeased to be asked.
“As you wish,” she said stiffly. “I shall send for my uncle in the morning.”
Uncle? The Countess had rather low relations for such a lofty position as lady of the estate if her uncle was a tailor.
“Capital,” said her husband. “Now, children”—he turned to us—“I bid you both good night. If there’s anything that makes me grouchier than an empty stomach, it’s lack of sleep. We’ve been on the road a long while and I look forward to laying my head upon an actual pillow. I shall see you in the morning. Sweet dreams.”
And with that, he and his wife swept indoors with Konrad, leaving us alone with the housekeeper.
“This way,” Nina said in thickly accented German. We followed her past the great entrance hall and toward the east wing of the house, down a flight of stairs, up another, through a set of doors, around a corner, then up and down and around and around again until I was thoroughly lost. If I thought solving the hedge maze in the Procházkas’ garden was difficult, it was nothing compared to this.
Our path through the estate was silent, for Nina’s grasp of German seemed to be limited to the two words given earlier, and Josef kept his own counsel. Although he seemed less closed off and withdrawn than before, I still had no idea of what he thought or felt of our strange adventure. Whether he was frightened. Nervous. Excited. Relieved. That face I had known and loved his entire life was opaque to me, as though he wore a mask of his own features.
We passed no one else on our way to our rooms—no footmen, no maids, no gardeners—a stark contrast to the liveried servants at Procházka House. The grounds at Snovin Hall were extensive and would have required a great deal of care, more than what a middle-aged housekeeper and seneschal could provide. The neglect showed in a myriad ways: in the warped wooden window frames, the cobweb-dusted furniture in empty rooms, the birds’ nests and rodent burrows tucked into the exposed eaves and moldering couch cushions. The world outside crept in through the crevices, vines crawling up rotted wallpaper, weeds working their way through the cracks in the floor.
I am the inside-out man.
Soon we emerged into a nicer—or at least, better kept—part of the house. As with their domicile in Vienna, the Procházkas possessed a number of exquisite curios at their country estate: tiny pewter farmers threshing wheat, a herd of bronze sheep leaping over fences, a beautifully ornate clock with golden rings that circled the hours of the heavens. Each of these trinkets were mechanical like the swan in their banquet hall, moving with fluid motions almost too smooth to be real.
We walked up another flight of stairs until we arrived at a long gallery. Nina unlocked one of the doors and we followed her into our quarters, a suite of connected rooms. A large, double-sided fireplace divided our sleeping quarters, with doors on either side that could be shut to maintain our privacy. The fires were already lit, and the rooms pleasantly warm and dry—almost toasty—compared to the drafty corridor just beyond the threshold. The rooms themselves were comfortably appointed, if a bit threadbare. There was a secondhand quality to all the furniture, although they all seemed to be heirloom pieces. A washbasin and pitcher of water stood on the bedside table in the room
, but there was no mirror atop the vanity. I thought of the fifty florins the Countess had gifted me in order to lure me to Vienna and wondered why their ancestral seat was in such shabby condition. They had the funds to maintain Snovin Hall, surely.
“Is good?” Nina smiled, her dark eyes nearly lost in the crinkle of dumpling cheeks.
“It’s fine, thank you,” I said.
She nodded and pointed to a cupboard full of linens and candles. “Is good?” she asked again. Then she said something in Bohemian I couldn’t figure out. The housekeeper mimed eating, and after some back and forth, I understood that trays of food would be sent to our rooms.
“Thank you, Nina,” I said.
The housekeeper glanced at Josef, who had kept sullen, silent watch during the entire exchange. He did not offer his gratitude, either genuine or perfunctory, and Nina left us, looking a little disgruntled. Her footsteps tapped out rude, rude, rude, growing fainter in the distance.
We were alone.
For a long time, neither my brother nor I said a word. We had not yet decided whose room was which, but neither of us made a move to claim either as our own. The crackling of the fire filled the space between us, making conversation with the shadows on the wall. There was so much I had to say to Josef, and yet there was nothing to be said at all.
“Well, mein Brüderchen,” I said softly. “Here we are.”
He met my gaze. “Yes,” he said. “We are.”
And for the first time in an age, I saw my brother, really and truly saw him. Until that moment, I had seen Josef as the little boy who had left me behind—sweet, sensitive, shy. My Sepperl. Sepp. But the man who stood before me was not that child.
He was taller, certainly, and lean with his height, towering over me by a head. His golden curls were overgrown, not in the manner that was currently fashionable in the cosmopolitan places of the world, but in the absentminded way of a genius who had more pressing concerns on his mind than his appearance. Time had honed all the softness from his cheeks and chin so that he was no longer the cherub-faced sprite of our childhood, but a gangly-limbed youth. His blue eyes were harder, less innocent, his gaze distant and dispassionate.