* * *
The night was clear as I made my way into the heart of the wood.
It had rained earlier that day, and a few clouds lingered, but the bright, full face of the moon shone down on me, touching the forest with silver frost. But I would have been able to find my way to the Goblin Grove even if the night had been as black as pitch. The woods and the legends surrounding it were etched into my bones, a map of my soul.
The walk was both longer and shorter than I remembered. The distance from grove to inn seemed to have shortened, but the time it took to reach it seemed to have grown. I came upon the Goblin Grove almost by surprise, the circular ring of twelve alder trees jumping out of the shadows like children playing peekaboo. I hesitated on the edges of the grove. The last time I stood here, I had crossed the barrier between worlds. The Goblin Grove was one of the few places left where the Underground and the world above existed together, a sacred space made holy by the old laws and my memories. I stood on the edge, waiting for a sense of trespass to overcome me as I crossed from one world back to the next.
It did not come.
I entered and sat down with my back against a tree, wrapping my cloak tighter about me.
“Ah, mein Herr,” I said softly to the night. “I am here. I am here at last.”
There was no answer. Even the forest was unwontedly quiet, without its usual sense of patient waiting. I felt awkward sitting here in the dark, like a child who had left home, only to return to find it not as they remembered. The grove was like and not like how I remembered it, but it wasn’t the minute and minuscule failings of memory that made it different; it was the emptiness.
I was alone.
For a moment, I considered going back, returning to the inn where it was warm, where it was bright, where it was safe. But I had promised my sister I would make peace, even if I did not know how. Even if there was no one to hear me.
“I am leaving for Vienna on the morrow,” I said. “I am leaving the Goblin Grove behind.”
I couldn’t help but pause to wait for a reply, even though I knew not to expect it. I wasn’t talking to myself; I was having a conversation, even if I was the only one participating.
“I should be happy. I am happy. I have always wanted to go to Vienna. I have always wanted to see the world beyond our little corner of Bavaria.”
It was getting easier now to speak as though to an audience and not myself. I wondered then if I wanted the Goblin King to respond, or if I merely wanted to leave my heart here before him, before the old laws.
“Is it not what you taught me, mein Herr? To love myself first instead of last?” My words hung before me in a cloud of mist. My wistfulness turned breath, my longing made visible. I was growing colder by the minute, the damp chill seeping through my cloak and into my bones. “Are you not happy for me?”
Again, no response. His absence was nearly a presence, a noticeable, unavoidable void. I wanted to close that void, to seal that abyss, and heal the fractures in my heart.
“I know what you would say,” I said. “Go forth and live, Elisabeth. Live and forget about me.” I heard his voice in my memory, a soft, expressive baritone as rich and warm as a bassoon. Or was it a powerful tenor, as sharp and clear as a clarionet? Time had blurred the details and edges of the Goblin King, turning him from a man back into a myth, no matter how hard I had tried to hold on. To remember.
“Forgetting is easy,” I whispered to the empty air. “Easier than I thought. Easier than I want to admit. Even now the exact colors of your eyes are no longer clear to me, mein Herr.”
I ran my fingers over the still-frozen ground. “But living?” There was nothing beneath my feet or fingers. No sense of thaw, no sleeping green waiting to burst forth. Dead, hollow, lifeless. “Living is hard. You didn’t tell me it would be so hard, mein Herr. You didn’t say a word.”
My limbs were growing numb from the chill, so I got back to my feet, stamping away the myriad prickling needles in my skin. I began to pace throughout the Goblin Grove, agitation and frustration keeping me warm.
“You didn’t tell me living would be one decision after another, some easy, some difficult. You didn’t tell me living wasn’t a battle, but a war. You didn’t tell me that living was a choice, and that every day I choose to continue was another victory, another triumph.”
It was more than agitation keeping me warm now; it was anger. It coiled within me, winding me tighter and tighter. My fingers curled, my jaws clenched. I was a spring ready to be sprung. I wanted to tear each alder tree from the earth by its roots, I wanted to claw and dig my way back to the Underground. I wanted to rip and scream and tear and shriek. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to hurt myself.
“I wish you were dead,” I said vehemently.
My voice did not echo in the woods, but the force of my emotions rang in my ears.
“I do,” I repeated. “Do you hear me, mein Herr? I wish you were dead!”
At last the forest took up my cry, a hundred mouthless voices repeating dead, dead, dead. I thought I heard the otherworldly giggles of Twig and Thistle, their high-pitched titters crawling up my skin. The old Liesl would have felt guilty for her uncharitable words, but the new Elisabeth did not. The Goblin King had taught me cruelty, after all.
“You would agree, of course,” I said with a bitter laugh. “No one could punish you harder than you punish yourself. You could have been a martyr. Saint Goblin King, willing to die for me, willing to die for love.
“But I’m not like you,” I continued. “I am not a saint; I am a sinner. I wish you were dead so I could live. If you were dead, I could bury you—in my heart and in my mind. I could mourn you, then let you go.”
I stopped pacing and wrapped my arms about myself beneath my cloak. Now that my anger was fading, the cold began to creep in. I drew the wolf’s-head ring out.
“You live an unlife instead,” I said. I held the ring before me and looked at it. It was old, tarnished, and even a little ugly. “An unlife, a not-death. You exist in the in-between spaces, between sleep and waking, between belief and imagination. I wish I could wake up, mein Herr. I wish I were awake.”
I undid the clasp and removed the chain with his ring from my neck. With a trembling hand, I set it down in the middle of the Goblin Grove.
“I won’t look back,” I said in a choked voice. “Not this time. Because you won’t be there to hold me back. I relinquish you, mein Herr, just as you let me go.” A sob hitched in my throat, but I swallowed it back down, straightening my spine with resolve.
“Goodbye,” I said. I did not turn around. “Farewell.”
I half expected, half hoped I would feel a ghostly hand upon my shoulder as I left, as I stepped foot from the Goblin Grove. But as it had been when I left the Underground, there was no touch, no half-whispered plea to stay. I couldn’t help but look for him anyway, my Goblin King. I gasped, my hand going to the ring I no longer wore at my throat. I could not be sure, but I thought I saw a tall, dark figure standing among the trees, watching me as I walked away.
Then I blinked and the figure was gone. Perhaps he had never been there, my madness made manifest from the mournful yearning of my muddled mind. I turned away and walked back home, toward my future, toward the mundane.
I almost made it to the inn before the tears fell.
late one morning, in early spring, a coach bearing passengers en route to Vienna arrived at an inn in Bavaria.
Two girls waited hand in hand to join them, one dark, one fair. Their clothes were simple, their belongings few, and though one was pretty and the other plain, they had the look of sisters. They bore mirrored expressions of hope and hollowness, like two halves of a whole. The passengers shuffled and grumbled, groaned and shifted, making room for the girls—one plump, one thin. The sisters took each other’s hands as the dark-haired one stared straight ahead, unwilling to acknowledge the demons only she could see.
Meanwhile, over the mountains and a country away, two boys—one dark, one fair—wa
lked the streets of Vienna side by side, en route from one home in the gutter to another in a finer part of the city. A footman dressed in poppy red had been dispatched to ferry their belongings to their new apartments, but their only possession was a single, slightly battered violin. Passersby shifted and shuffled, avoided and averted their gaze from the sight of the boys’ hands intertwined—one black, one white.
The dark-skinned boy knew that luck did not smile upon those of his color or class, and distrusted the sudden good fortune that brought a green-eyed woman to the house of L’Odalisque, searching for him and his beloved. The woman had come bearing gifts: an offer of patronage and a letter written in a hand unfamiliar to François, but precious to his fair-haired companion.
I am honored by your faith in my work and humbly accept your generous offer. Please convey all my love and affection to my brother, Herr Vogler. I implore you reassure him that his family have not abandoned him, just as his ever-loving sister prays that he has not forgotten her.
Yours most gratefully,
Composer of Der Erlkönig
François did not trust the green-eyed woman. He had learned long ago that nothing came without a price. But Josef still had faith, still believed in fairy tales and hope, magic and miracles. Josef took the letter.
And accepted.
It was late in the afternoon when the coach from Bavaria drew through the city gates and later still when two sisters stood before a set of apartments off Stephansplatz, near Vienna’s great cathedral at the heart of the city. The dark-haired one shivered in her red cloak as she stood outside, but not from the unseasonable spring chill. She was watching—waiting—in the darkened doorway for blue eyes, blond hair, and a shy, sweet smile. She was waiting for a little boy. She was waiting for her brother.
But the brother that emerged was not the child Liesl remembered. At sixteen, he could not properly be called a boy any longer. Josef had come into his full height, towering a head taller than both his sisters. Yet neither was he fully grown, for his chin was still bare, his limbs still gawky and gangly with unexpected growth. He was both a man and a child, and neither.
For a moment, Liesl and Josef stared at each other, doing nothing, saying nothing.
And then they broke.
She opened her arms and he ran into her embrace, just as they had when they were young and each other’s shelter from their father’s worst excesses. When they listened to scary stories at their grandmother’s knee. When the world was too much for them, and not enough.
“Liesl,” he murmured.
“Sepp,” she whispered.
The tears that fell from each other’s cheeks were warm and tasted of joy. They were together. They were home.
“Oh my goodness, Josef, how you’ve grown!” the fair-haired sister exclaimed.
Josef startled, surprised to see her. “What are you doing here, Käthe?”
He did not see the spasm of hurt that crossed her face. “Didn’t Liesl tell you?” Käthe huffed. “We’ve come to join you in Vienna!”
“Join me?” Josef turned his blue-eyed gaze to his sister, eyes that were paler and icier than Liesl remembered. “You’re not—you’re not here to take me home?”
“Home?” Käthe said incredulously. “But we are home now.”
The coachman had unloaded their things and driven away, leaving the makeshift family with nowhere to go but through the threshold and up the stairs to their new domicile. François and the landlady emerged from the shadows to help Käthe carry their belongings to the two-room apartments on the second floor. First the landlady, then François, then Käthe disappeared through the doorway, leaving Liesl and Josef on the street together, but alone.
“Home,” the blond boy said in a remote voice.
“Home,” the dark-haired sister echoed softly.
It was a long time before either of them spoke. She had traveled hundreds of miles—through forests and woods, over mountains and plains—to be with him, yet the distance between them had grown.
“Sepperl,” she began, then stopped. She did not know what to say.
“Liesl,” he said coldly. There was nothing to be said.
And then the fair-haired boy turned around and vanished into the darkness of their new life without another word, leaving his sister to finally understand—to know—that she had spent miles upon miles upon miles running down the wrong road.
EVER MINE
Why this deep grief, where necessity speaks?
—LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, the Immortal Beloved letters
STRANGE PROCLIVITIES
it all began with an invitation.
“Message for you, Fräulein.” Frau Messer accosted me at the door as I returned from Naschmarkt with the week’s groceries in tow. “Looks like it’s another one from your”—her lips twitched—“mysterious benefactor.”
It wasn’t often our landlady emerged from her hidey-hole on the ground floor, but nothing flushed city folk from their dens faster than the possibility of good gossip. Any bit of information about our anonymous patron was too delicious a morsel for her to ignore.
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said politely. I reached for the letter, but she held it just beyond reach. Frau Messner was not tall; she was a short, stout woman with sharp features that brought to mind a plump, well-fed ferret, but I could not retrieve my message without stepping in closer than I was comfortable.
“’Twas brought over by a liveried servant this time.” Her beady eyes darted from the letter to my face and back again, inviting me—taunting me—to say more. “Queer little fellow. Small as a child, dressed in red with his white wig all tufty ’bout his head like dandelion fluff.”
I gave her a tight smile. “Was he?”
“Not many noble families in Vienna outfit their liveries in red,” she mused. “But fewer still mark their correspondence with the sign of the poppy.” Frau Messner held the letter up before me, where I could clearly see the image of the flower pressed into the wax seal. “Your benefactor is quite unusual, Fräulein. I understand better now how you came across your good fortune in the city.”
I stiffened. I had been in the city long enough to know that luck was merely power in another guise. While I had not expected our lives to be easy, what I hadn’t expected was just how dependent we would be on another’s kindness, another’s whim. The apartments in which we lived were already leased in our names when we arrived, introductions and invitations to influential members of society penned and received, lines of credit established with shopkeepers, every need anticipated, arranged, and attended to. Our rude and rustic ways were already the subject of much ridicule, but what we could not be forgiven for was our good fortune. Our luck had little to do with success, and everything to do with access.
“I see,” I said, schooling my features into a neutral expression.
“I meant no disrespect, my dear,” she said, but her sneer belied her words. “Count Procházka is richer than Croesus, and how he chooses to spend his money is his own affair.”
A flush crossed my face, betraying my agitation despite my best efforts to keep calm. “If you please,” I said, holding out my hand. “My message.”
Frau Messner hesitated. “A word of warning before you go.” She absently fiddled with the edges of the letter, almost as though she were reluctant to speak. “You are young and so very innocent in the ways of the world. Know that there are unsavory predators in this town who would prey upon that naïveté.”
“I am not so credulous as all that,” I said, a trifle defensively.
“I know, Fräulein,” Frau Messner said. “Only . . . I was like you once. Homely, hungry, and eager to make something of myself.” Her eyes fell to the letter in my hand. “Your patron is said to be rather eccentric, and prone to . . . strange proclivities.”
Ice trickled down my spine. “I beg your pardon?”
Strange proclivities. I thought I could hear the snicker beneath her sugary-sweet demeanor, the questioning, judgmental glances that lingere
d on my sister’s buxom figure, on François’s dark complexion, on Josef’s choirboy face.
Seeing my misgiving, my landlady went on. “They say the count and his followers are lovers of the poppy,” she said in a conspiratorial tone.
I glanced at the red crest on the letter with the image of a flower pressed into the wax. “Do you mean . . . opium? Laudanum?”
“Aye,” she said. “Theirs is a house of madmen and dreamers, of smoke and visions. Laudanum loosens the mind and”—the smirk was back on her face—“loosens other things as well.” Her gaze trailed down my rail-thin figure, my sallow skin, and overlarge eyes, and a prurient glint lit their beady depths.
I went rigid. “How dare you?” I asked in a low voice.
Frau Messner lifted her brows. “Gossip spreads through this city faster than fire, Fräulein,” she said. “And the tales that come out of Procházka House are more incendiary than most.”
I had had enough. “I appreciate your advice,” I said shortly, snatching the letter from her hand. Turning, I made my way up the stairs to our apartments.
“I don’t say this to be mean or cruel, Elisabeth,” she called after me. “The last young woman the Procházkas took under their wing disappeared under . . . mysterious circumstances.”
I paused on the stairwell.
“She was a poor, plain little thing from the country,” she went on. “A distant relation of theirs, or so they claimed. From what I heard, she was a particular favorite of the Countess. ‘Like a daughter to them,’ they said.”
After a moment, I succumbed to my curiosity and turned to face Frau Messner. “What happened to her?”
My landlady grimaced. “There was . . . an incident. At their country home. In Bohemia. Details are scarce, but there are reports of some sort of . . . ritual. The next morning the girl was gone and one of their friends was dead.”
“Dead?” I was startled.
“Aye.” She nodded. “They claim there was no foul play”—she snorted—“but the young man was found out in the woods, his lips blue with frost and a strange gray mark across the throat.”