And the changeling hated him a little for it.
The Goblin King joined the changeling by the maiden’s side, covering his hands with his own. Together they pushed down upon her chest, feeling the pulse, pulse, pulse of her heart beating beneath their palms.
“Please,” the changeling said, turning his eyes to the mass of goblin hands and eyes and teeth watching with an impassive, implacable, impersonal gaze. “What can I do?”
Do, mischling? the legion of voices was amused. Do what? Save her life? It is too late. She has made her choice.
“She did it to save me!” He turned on the Goblin King. “How could you just let her die?”
Blame him not, the old laws said. He is a hollow husk of a thing. We ate his soul already; he has nothing left to give.
The changeling threw his head back and screamed.
From the crawling, writhing mass of creatures, two small goblin girls clawed and wriggled their way free. Other hands burst forth and grabbed at their ankles, their wrists, their limbs, any bit of their bodies within reach, but the girls were determined, biting and scratching as they fought their way to the changeling and the Goblin King.
“Mischling,” said the one nearest to him. She was slender, like a sapling tree, with a crown of branches wound with cobwebs atop her head. “There is a way to save her.”
Silence! the old laws roared.
“That one,” said the other, a short stout little thing with thistledown hair, pointing at the Goblin King, “has given all he can give. He has nothing left.” Her black eyes were solemn. “But you do, mischling. You do.”
The changeling looked to the man at his side. He was shaking his head, in resignation or denial, the changeling did not know what. “He should not have to bear the cost.”
“What cost?” the changeling demanded.
“Eternity,” the Goblin King whispered. “Unending torment.”
The changeling went still. He knew then what the sacrifice would claim of him, what the old laws required.
A king.
“No,” the man beside him said. “She cannot bear to lose you, Josef. Elisabeth would never forgive you.”
Josef. It was a name he had stolen, an identity and a face and a life he had taken for his own. The fat, sweet little mortal child who had died of scarlatina before he had had a chance to live. The changeling had seen his opportunity, and taken it. He had become the boy in the cradle. He had become Liesl’s brother.
“How?” he breathed. The changeling turned to the face wrought of nightmares. “What must I do?”
“It was never a bride who was needed to bring the world back to life,” said the twig-laden goblin girl. “It was grace.”
The Goblin King gave the girl a sharp look. “Explain yourself, Twig.”
Twig trembled and shivered, buffeted about by fear and eagerness. “Only a person given willingly to the Underground with a whole heart understands the true price to be paid and offers it with joy.”
“Grace, mischling,” said the thistle-haired goblin, “is the capacity to love the world entire. Without regard to self. Without regard to the individual. The first Goblin King understood this.”
The man beside him stiffened. “Then why a bride, Thistle?” he asked. “Why must innocent blood be spilled to wake the world to spring?” The changeling could hear the words the man did not say. Why did I have to suffer? Why did she?
“A sacrifice made with half a heart is worth half its value,” Thistle replied. “You were tricked onto your throne, Your Majesty. The first Goblin King was tricked out of his.”
“By whom?” the changeling demanded.
The goblin girls exchanged glances. “We do not speak her name,” said Twig.
The first Goblin Queen.
“She loved him,” Thistle said. “And she was selfish. When the Goblin King let her go, she returned to the Underground to claim him. To steal him away. And in his place she left another. A mewling, frightened lad,” she sneered. “Who lasted barely a breath before finding another to take his place.”
“But you, mischling,” Twig said softly. “You understand what it is to love the world entire. You have walked amongst mortals, you have lived amongst them. You have even loved them, in the only way we fey know how. Distantly. Dispassionately. But it does not mean it is any less deep.”
The changeling stared at the dagger in his sister’s hand, still wet with her blood. “But I have no soul to give,” he said.
“She gave you a name,” Twig said gently. “And you took it to forge your own soul.”
Sepperl.
The man beside him was shaking his head, but did not say a word in protest. The changeling took the weapon from his sister’s hand.
“Oh, Josef,” the man said. There were tears in his mismatched eyes, and there was great compassion in their blue and green depths. “You don’t have to do this.”
But he did.
“Take care of her,” he whispered to the man beside him. “She deserves to be loved.”
The man nodded his head, but could not speak. Josef heard him anyway. I will.
The old laws were silent and watchful as the changeling took the dagger.
And pierced his own heart.
A WHOLE HEART AND A WORLD ENTIRE
the shadows shift and stir, and my brother separates himself from my reflection, from my thoughts, and emerges as himself, whole and entire beside me.
“Liesl,” he calls softly.
“Sepperl. Is it you? Or are you me?”
“I am you,” he says. “And you are me. We are the left and right hands of a single fortepianist. We are part of a larger whole, greater than us, greater than the world.”
My sanctuary is dark, for not even the flame atop the altar can lift the despair around me. The candle I had cut from my cage of bones lies discarded, cold and dead, beside the plinth. “What do I do, Sepp?” I say in a hoarse voice. “How do I choose?”
“You don’t,” he says simply.
“What do you mean?” I can still hear the echoes of the old laws in my ears, ringing with such force and authority. Pay the price, and the other goes free.
“You don’t,” he repeats. “For the choice is mine.”
“No!” I lunge forward and take my brother by the hand. “You can’t.”
“Why not, Elisabeth?” The Goblin King stands beside Josef, his form and figure as I had always known him. His mismatched eyes a faded green and gray, his face lean, his hair in silver-white-gold disarray about his head.
“Because . . . because . . .” But I cannot find the right words to say. This choice should be mine. It had always been mine.
“Stop being so selfish,” Josef teases. “Let us take on the burden for once.”
“I’m trying not to be,” I say in a small voice. “Selfish, that is.”
“Have you learned nothing from your time Underground?” The Goblin King stoops to pick my candle off the floor. “What was it I asked you oh so long ago?”
“When will you learn to be selfish,” I whisper. “When you will learn to do anything for yourself?”
“And when will you learn to let others do things for you?” The Goblin King hands my candle to my brother, who relights my flame with the marsh light in his own heart.
“Is this real?” I dare not voice the question louder than a murmur.
“What is real?” the Goblin King asks.
I shake my head. I do not know.
“Reality is what you make of it, Elisabeth,” he says. “The same as madness. Whether or not this is real matters not to me, but it matters to you. Therefore, which is it? What would you rather have it be?”
The feel of his skin against mine, the scent of his musk, the taste of his lips. The Goblin King has height and breadth and weight in my hands, and I watch the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes in and out. In and out. I have a sudden memory, or rather, a vision of the future, but one so closely lived as to be memory. I remember the two of us lying in bed, side b
y side, our bodies sticky with satisfaction and wrapped in the warm glow of easy comfort. I remember how the features of his face grow sharper with age, the skin thinning to reveal the fine lines and bones beneath. I remember the silver-white-gold of his hair turning white with frost, true white now, not the enchanted glitter of magic and the Underground. I remember how we grow old together.
“Real,” I say.
“Then name me.” His eyes are solemn. “Give me back to myself, Elisabeth.”
“But I do not know your name,” I tell him, my tongue tripping over my tears.
“You have always had it,” he replies. He presses his hand against my chest. “You have carried it ever and always, bringing remnants of me back into the world above.”
The monastery. I think of the names hewn into the stone walls of the catacombs, brothers long dead and gone. Mahieu, I remember. But that is not the Goblin King’s name. I realize then that I do know it, in bits, in pieces, in dreams. A wolf-boy, a feral child, a name carved into a windowsill.
“How . . .” I trail off.
He laughs softly. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“I really do wish He would be a little less mysterious and a lot more forthcoming,” I say irritably. The Goblin King chuckles.
“You gave me a name,” Josef says. My brother’s smile is tender and sweet, and I do not think I can bear the pain. “Now give him his.”
He takes my hand and places it in the Goblin King’s. My austere young man. My—
“Wolfgang,” I whisper.
Josef returns my candle to me, lit not with the fire from my altar, but from the marsh light in his own chest. His soul, my soul. I reach forward and light the candle in the Goblin King’s chest.
The shadows fall away.
“Go,” Josef says, and he points toward a window, where a girl with sunshine hair and summer-blue eyes stands with palms outstretched, waiting to take me by the hand.
“Käthe,” I murmur.
Behind my sister stands François. My brother and his beloved lock eyes. What is said in that long, quiet gaze is unknown to me, for although theirs is a language of love, it is not the language I speak. After a moment, François nods. It is not a nod of resignation or defeat, but of acceptance. Of farewell. Josef nods his head in return.
“Go,” my brother repeats. “Go, and play your music for the world. Be the self you are meant to be, Liesl, just as I am the king I choose to be.”
“But how can I play without you?” I don’t bother to wipe away the tears streaming down my cheeks.
“You have him,” he says, tilting his head toward the Goblin King. Toward Wolfgang. “But you will always have me too. Your music is a bridge, Liesl,” he says. “Play it, and we shall always be together. Play it, and I shall always remember. You. Life. What it means to love. For your music was the first and only thing in this world that kept me human, the first and last thing I give back to you.”
I am crying so hard I can barely speak. “I love you, Sepperl.” Great, heaving sobs, and I cannot breathe, cannot gulp enough air to say this last goodbye. “I love you, mein Brüderchen. With my whole heart.”
Josef smiles, and the tips of his teeth gleam in the flickering candlelight. “And I love you, Liesl,” he says softly. “With the world entire.”
a baby cries in a cradle before stopping, the red fading from its overflushed cheeks.
It grows very still, pale, and wan.
Josef?
A little girl walks into the room. She is sallow-skinned and skinny, with dark hair and eyes that seem to take over her entire face. She leans over the cradle and touches her brother’s cheek.
The baby opens its eyes. They are a flat black. Goblin’s eyes. Changeling eyes.
Sepperl?
There is worry in her voice, and love. At the sound, the black in the baby’s eyes dwindles, and a pale blue appears in its place. It reaches out a tiny hand to the little girl, who holds it tightly in her own. The little girl begins to sing. A lullaby, a melody of her own making. It moves something within him, something new, something different, something marvelous.
A memory.
His memory. The first he could truly call his own, for it did not belong to the Underground, or to Liesl, or to anyone but himself.
Der Erlkönig.
In the distance, music plays. It is the sound of his sister’s voice, reaching across the veil between worlds. And as he had done when he was a baby in a cradle, Josef reaches back.
Their souls touch, and it is a bridge. He had a name. He had a soul. He had grace.
Der Erlkönig remembers what it is to love.
And brings the world back to life.
To Anna Katharina Magdalena Ingeborg Vogler
Care of the Faithful
Vienna
My darling Käthe,
We have arrived safe and sound back in Bavaria with Mother and Constanze. Despite our fears, the inn has prospered without us, a steady flow of business filling our coffers instead of Papa’s debts. Our grandmother is as irritable and irascible as ever, although she did rouse herself from her quarters to greet Wolfgang. Like everyone else we’ve met on this journey back to the Goblin Grove, she is relentlessly charmed by him, although she would furiously deny it if asked.
“Where did you find such a young man?” she demanded. “How was such a small, plain little thing like you able to ensorcell him into marriage?”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” was Wolfgang’s reply, an answer that endeared him to Mother’s churchgoing sensibilities, but unfortunately distanced him from Constanze’s rather heretical ones.
“Pah,” she said. “He is not one of Der Erlkönig’s own, I see.”
“Alas, no,” he replied. “I am my own, I’m afraid.”
Everyone looked at me as though I were mad as I laughed and laughed and laughed.
Our small, provincial village was just as shocked as Constanze to find me returned with a husband, and perhaps none more so than Herr Baumgärtner. I confess to feeling a measure of petty satisfaction to note how much more handsome than Hans my Wolfgang is, even as I know that is beneath me. I give you permission to tease me about it later, Käthe. I know.
I paid our respects to Papa’s grave in the old church cemetery. The old rector is gone, vanished from his bed last winter with nothing but poppies left in his wake. I noted another headstone beside our father’s as we left, new to me, but old and weathered as though it had been there for years.
Franz Josef Gottlieb Vogler
Gone Too Soon
I left a poppy behind.
Tomorrow I shall venture to the Goblin Grove one last time with our offerings. The locks of hair from you and François have thankfully survived the journey, and I shall bury them in the grove. And then, as the sun sets in the west on the first night of summer, I shall play Der Erlkönig upon my new violin. Wolfgang had it refinished with the finial of the carved woman that had been in our family for generations as a wedding gift. I can’t believe you and François found it in your dressing room.
When I was younger, I could not decide whether the woman’s face was one of agony or ecstasy, but now that I am grown, I understand her expression for what it is:
Joy.
I have not heard word of the Procházkas since we departed Vienna, but rumor is that Snovin Hall is overgrown. Sometimes I think of that blue-green lake hidden in the hills above their estate and wonder.
We shall return once the sale of the inn is final. Mother has been beside herself with excitement to see you again, and even Constanze seems eager to leave this place behind.
“The place is full of so many ghosts,” she said. “And I cannot rest for their relentless chatter.”
The villagers think she has lost her mind, but I understand better now how our grandmother thinks. Those of us with one foot Underground and one in the world above are ever privy to the uncanny and unseen. Is that madness? Or merely another way of being?
Give my love to Franço
is. Tell him I look forward to how the troupe has staged the opera when we return, and how much I have appreciated his guidance and his tutelage on the writing and composition. The story was mine to tell, but the music was a work of collaboration.
Before we leave, Wolfgang insists we debut the Wedding Night Sonata for the villagers, so they might have something to remember us by.
“So they understand the whole of you, Elisabeth,” he told me. “So they understand the entirety of us.”
I don’t know what the butcher and baker will think of the music, but I fancy they’ll enjoy a performance nonetheless. The ending of the Wedding Night Sonata keeps changing, and I imagine it will change still further, on and on and on until I die. But that is the way of a life’s work, and I am happy to keep composing, to keep writing, until I find the right finale.
One last thing before I end my letter. I know you would rather have me keep the wolf’s-head ring, or at least have it appraised for its value. But in the end, a promise is without price. When I step into the Goblin Grove for the last time, I will leave it for our brother, along with your locks of hair and our love.
Yours always,
Composer of Der Erlkönig
Where I am, you are with me.
— LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, the Immortal Beloved letters
once there was a little girl who played her music for a little boy in the wood. She was the genius, he was the interpreter, and they were each the gardeners of the other’s heart, taming, tilling, and tending the fertile soil of their souls until they blossomed into a far-reaching forest that encompassed the world.
Their grandmother had taught them the old ways and the old laws, but the little girl and boy were not afraid, for they were both Der Erlkönig’s own.
Don’t forget me, Liesl.
And the little girl did not reply. Instead she played her song for the Goblin King every spring, every year, to bring the world from death back into life. And when the little girl’s gnarled and aged fingers could no longer hold her bow, her children and students picked up her song and continued to play, one long, unbroken melody that stretched across time and memory. On and on and on, for as long as the seasons turn and the living remember all that is good and beautiful and worthwhile in the world.