Wintersong

  “Elisabeth, Elisabeth,” he shushed. “Elisabeth, wait.”

  Wait? I had waited my entire life for this moment. Not for consummation, but for validation; I desired so hard I wanted to be found desirable in return. The Goblin King saw me—all of me—and now I wanted him to know me. I pushed away his restraining hand and leaped forward; I was a cat, a wolf, a huntress. I was out for blood and flesh.

  “Stop.” His voice was firmer now. I ignored him, pulling at his cloak, his shirt, his breeches. “Stop, Elisabeth. Please.”

  It was his please, not his protestations, that broke through my determination.

  “Stop?” My voice was thick. “Why?”

  “Because,” he said, his words slow and sluggish, “because you know not what you do.”

  My mind was slow to parse his words. I know not what I do. Then my cheeks burned. “Oh.”

  Clarity burned away the haze of lust that fogged my senses; my embarrassment stung worse than any slap to the face. I turned my back to him.

  “If I know not what I do,” I said, my voice quavering. “It is only because I am unschooled and untutored. Untouched.” I swallowed. “I could be taught, mein Herr. I am a quick study.”

  “I don’t doubt that.”

  I sensed his presence behind me, near enough to touch, but not nearly near enough. I cringed at how desperate I sounded. I did not want to be desperate. But I was. Oh, God, please touch me, I thought. Please.

  He stepped closer to me. I could not see him, but I could imagine him. I could imagine those mismatched wolf’s eyes staring down at me, at my neck, down the low line of my wedding gown to where my shoulder blades were exposed. I could imagine his fingers, long and slender, reaching out to trace them, stopping just short of actual contact. I could imagine this all so clearly, but what I could not imagine was the expression on his face.

  “Elisabeth.” His tone was steady. “There’s so much you don’t know. Would you still want this if you knew?”

  A laugh burst from me. I could no more disguise my wanting than I could my eagerness. Neither could he. I had felt the shape of him through his trousers, pressed against me.

  “Yes,” I breathed. “Yes, I would. Yes, I do. I want this.”

  The Goblin King gripped my shoulders tight and pulled me against him. One arm snaked across my neck, the other wrapped around my waist. I felt every last bit of him through the thin cloth of my wedding gown. He trembled as he held me. I was breathing hard, my breathing made harder by his arm pressing against my throat.

  I arched my back and closed my eyes. I covered his hand about my waist with my own, and brought my other hand up to touch his face. Beneath my fingers, the feathery pieces of his hair, the curve of a cheekbone, the strength of his jaw. His head bent, bringing his mouth to graze against where my neck met my shoulder. A soft kiss, a light bite. A nip. I moaned. The echoes of that moan ran up and down his body.

  Slow, too slow. I wanted him to devour me, break me with the urgency of his lust. If he could not give that to me, then I would take it from him. I took the hand at my waist and moved it lower, closer to where I wanted him. His fingers clenched at the skin of my hipbone, rucking up the sheer material of my dress, exposing my bare leg to the air inch by inch. I struggled against him—not to run away, but to hurry him along. With agonizing slowness, his fingers explored my body below my waist, dipping, stroking, caressing. Not enough, I thought. Not enough.

  My hand threaded through his hair tightened with impatience. He let out a slight hiss of pain. Moans of pain, moans of pleasure—to my ears, they were all sung in the same key. His fingers buried in my secret crevices tightened in response and I gasped—or tried to—my inarticulate cry lost in his stranglehold about my neck.

  My other hand—the one guiding his course across my thighs, my hips, between my legs—reached behind me to touch him. I slid my hand down the length of his hardness, the proof of his desire unmistakable through his leather breeches. His hips bucked and a long shudder ran through him. I gripped him harder, staking my claim on him. Mine, I thought. Mine.

  But he was shying away from my touch, pulling out of my grasp and away from me. I growled in frustration, but suddenly he wasn’t there. I opened my eyes and turned around.

  The world tilted, and for a moment, I could not find my equilibrium. The Goblin King stood only a few yards from me, but the distance was infinite. His feathery hair was a bird’s nest of ratted tangles, his lips swollen, his cheeks flushed. His wolf’s eyes glowed.

  “Enough, Elisabeth.” He was short of breath. “Enough.”

  I massaged my sore throat and gaped at him. “Enough?” I rasped.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “No more. Not tonight. I will have your attendants escort you back to your chambers.”

  “What?” The question burst from me before I could help myself. “Why?”

  “Because,” he said again. “I don’t want this. Not now. Not like this.”

  The humiliation of his words burned. The flimsy silk of my wedding gown would go up in flames from its contact with my skin. Humiliation, shame, lust, desire, all burning. I was burning. How could he send me away? The room smelled of our mutual passion, musty and warm, and I had held the proof of his wanting me in my hand.

  An old wound opened up inside me, and all my feelings of worthlessness came pouring out. I was bleeding shame. I should have known better than to place my heart before him; I had exposed my innermost self to someone I trusted once before, only to have it ridiculed for being untutored, unschooled, unremarkable.

  I hid my face from the Goblin King so he would not see me cry.

  His hand touched my shoulder, and in his touch I felt nothing but gentle consolation. That hurt most of all.

  I threw him off. “Don’t touch me,” I hissed. “You don’t get to touch me. Not like—not like that.”

  “Like what?” His voice was kind.

  “Like—like you don’t care.” My skin was raw. Everything was tender to the touch, my entire body yearning and reaching for sensation and meeting nothing but rejection. I smoothed down my wedding gown over my hips. My wedding veil—that diamond-spangled gauze—had fallen off during our embrace, and it lay pooled at my feet.

  “Elisabeth,” he said. “I abstain because I do care—”

  “Then why won’t you touch me?” A sob hitched in my throat and I hated myself for my weakness. “Why won’t you take what is yours?”

  “It’s not mine to take,” he said, much more fiercely than I expected. “It’s yours to give.”

  “And I’m giving it to you now!” I gathered the fallen wedding veil to me, as though I could hide my humiliation in its spangled gauze.

  “And I do not want you,” he said quietly. “Not like this.”

  It was so unfair. Despite the evidence of his lust straining against his leather breeches, he hid it all behind a cloak, behind a mantle of sarcasm and a disaffected air. I could have screamed.

  I turned around. “You said you wanted me—entire.” I hurled his words back at him with all the bitterness I could muster.

  The Goblin King closed his eyes, as if he could shut out my words along with the sight of me. My heart thudded in my chest—was I truly so distasteful to men that not even a king of hobgoblins wanted me?

  “This is not you entire,” he said. “This is you, desperate.”

  His words were salt in my wounds.

  “What do you want from me, then?” I was desperate, but I was beyond the point of caring now. “Why did you marry me, if not for this?”

  This time it was the Goblin King who stumbled back, as though I had slapped him. “If you thought that I wanted—”

  But I did not want to hear what he had to say.

  “Perhaps you are now afflicted with buyer’s remorse,” I said. “Perhaps you should have taken the beautiful sister instead.”

  “Elisabeth,” the Goblin King said warningly. “Stop.”

  I should have stopped, but I did not want to stop. My tongue, o
nce loosened by goblin wine, could not be tightened back into submission.

  “Well, mein Herr,” I said. “You married the ugly one. And,” I continued with a high, shrill titter, “you’ve made your bed. Now you’d better sleep in it. So come, my lord,” I said coyly, running my hands down the curves of my body—what few I had. “Come sleep with your new bride. If you can stomach it.”

  The Goblin King made a disgusted sound, a sound that shattered what little confidence I had left. A lump rose in my throat and I swallowed it back with a hiccough.

  “Go to bed, Elisabeth,” he said. “You’re drunk.”

  Was I? I had drunk wine and beer before, had even stolen a little bit of the schnapps Constanze kept in her secret cupboard when I was a child, but I had never drunk myself into indulgence. Not like Papa. Never like Papa.

  The ground was unsteady beneath my feet. The room spun, and I was falling. The Goblin King rushed forward to hold me up.

  “Twig, Thistle!” My goblin attendants appeared in an instant. “Take my bride back to her chambers and make sure she is well rested.”

  “No.” I threw up a hand. I drew myself up to my fullest height and tried to muster a little dignity. “I can see myself out, mein Herr.”

  I stumbled away from him, but long fingers twined themselves in my hair, forcing my head back and into the Goblin King’s embrace.

  “I do want you,” he whispered in my ear. “But I want the part of you that you will not give me. This”—and he ran his hand down the column of my exposed throat, my chest, my waist—“this is only part of you. When I said I wanted you entire, I meant it.”

  “What part of me have I not given you?”

  He smiled into my hair.

  “You know what it is, Elisabeth.” He hummed a bit of a melody.

  My music.

  I wrenched myself from his grasp and shoved him away. I wished for a door to appear. Then I wrenched the handle open and slammed it shut, its loud, satisfying clang the last word in our conversation.

  * * *

  My bravado lasted only as long as the walk to my own chambers. The paths in the Underground rearranged themselves so I found myself in the corridor outside my room. I unlocked the door and threw myself inside, eager to outpace the howls of rage and disappointment that dogged my heels.

  I could not breathe. The burn of tears scalded my lower lashes, but none came. I wanted to scream, I wanted to tear my room to shreds. I wanted to destroy something. I wanted to destroy him.

  I grasped the Louis Quinze set by my hearth and hurled it against the earthen walls with all my might. The table and chairs, delicate as they seemed, were sturdier than they looked and merely bounced off. I did scream then, and picked up one of the chairs by its legs before smashing it against the gleaming travertine of the fireplace. It was a few blows before the chair splintered, sending chips and shards of the white stone with it. I threw what was left of the ruined chair into the fire. The table and the other chair soon followed.

  Then the other objects in my room. The candelabras, the console tables, the beautiful and ugly objets d’art. I picked up the statuette of the leering satyr and orgiastic nymph and threw it as hard as I could against the solid wood of my door. Made of porcelain, it shattered immediately.

  I screamed and raged and kicked and shrieked and cried and destroyed until my anger and frustration were spent. I lay on the floor and debris of my bedroom, my breath coming in short gasps.

  My wedding dress choked me. I made a feeble attempt to rip the fine silk off me, but could not muster enough hatred for strength. I was empty. After a whirlwind evening of hopes and disappointment, the emptiness was blessedly comforting. I listened to the crackle of the fire, searching for patterns in the sound. For music. For structure. For sense.

  A handful of notes came to me, a short rise, a rushed fall. The motion of a hand reaching out, only to fall uselessly by my side. It repeated over and over, faster and faster, until the storm of sixteenth notes rushing out of me crashed into a jangling chord. I had never written something like this before. It wasn’t pretty; it was messy, discordant, ugly, and it perfectly suited my mood.

  Paper. I ought to write it down. But I had destroyed everything in my room. A laugh escaped me. Tripping myself up at every turn. How like me.

  I glanced at the mostly white expanse of my wedding gown, unsullied and untorn, save for a splash of wine and dirt here and there. I reached for a large splinter near me and charred the end in the fire before cooling it quickly with breath and fingers.

  Then I used the ash to write.

  * * *

  An incomplete musical phrase wormed its way into my sleep, begging me to finish it. But I could not grasp its shape. I did not know how to resolve the questions it posed. The phrase seemed familiar, like a half-whistled tune from my childhood, but I could not place where I had heard it before.

  I startled myself awake. The fire in the hearth had died down to embers, and I was cold and naked on my debris-strewn floor. My wedding gown hung from my bedpost, the white silk covered with ashen scribbles—remnants of my moody masterpiece. I ran my grubby hands down its silken length. So fragile. So temporary. One smudge of my dirty fingertips could erase hours of work. I teased my fingers along the edges of my notes, the temptation to destroy even this rising strong within me. I swallowed it down.

  The silk gown rustled gently. There was a draft in my barrow room. Shivering, I rose to my feet in search of that spectral breeze when I stumbled across a threshold.

  I blinked. My barrow room had been sealed, shut, and locked with a key. The door was still there, but next to the hearth was an arch that had not been there before. The breeze came from the space beyond the threshold.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Evidence of my fury and frustration was still scattered over the floor. This was my room. That was my bed. That was my wedding gown, still hanging from its post. Not wanting to put the dress back on, I wished for a dressing gown. I found one on my bed, rumpled and wrinkled as though it had been tossed rather than magicked there. I put it on, and stepped into the darkness.

  Fairy lights winked into existence the moment I crossed into this new room, fluttering slowly, as though they struggled to wake. Their soft glow illuminated another set of rooms, larger and grander than my barrow bedchamber, yet somehow still small and intimate in scale. Standing in the center was a klavier.

  My breath caught. The instrument was beautiful, made of a rich, warm, dark wood that gleamed under the fairy lights. I ran my hands reverently over the keys, polished to a dull shine. It was a full octave larger than the klaviers in our inn, and when I pressed a key, a clear, full sound filled the room. None of the tinny, brassy resonance that plagued the instruments at home.

  I lightly tapped out a melody, allowing myself to fall into a reverie. I had been lost, but now a piece of myself had been returned to me. Then I noticed the stack of paper and ink on a small table beside the klavier.

  Staff paper. Parchment already lined with a musical staff, waiting only for a clef, a key, and a signature. I stiffened.

  Another trick, I thought. Another taunt of the Goblin King.

  The room held the silent echoes of a mocking laugh. I was tempted to dash the inkwell against the keyboard and tear the staff paper to shreds. But the memory of a tall, elegant stranger in a marketplace stayed my hand. A tall, elegant stranger who approached a plain, homely girl because he had heard the music within her and wanted to set it free.

  My fingers twitched, longing to work my hands into the keys, longing to set my feelings to paper. The wedding gown hung in my bedchamber, so close, yet so far away. I wanted to take its ash and turn it to ink.

  But I didn’t.

  I turned and walked back to my barrow room, the fairy lights winking out one by one, snuffed out like candles. I did not know what time it was. The painting of the Goblin Grove above my hearth showed the thin gray scene of snow falling. The hour could be predawn. It could be late dusk. It was hard to tell, the li
ght flattened by the gentle snow falling down on its black branches.

  I squinted. I could swear the snow was falling. Moving. The snowflakes were coming down, settling across the wintry landscape. Whether it was the lack of sleep, or the crusty remnants of tears blurring my vision, I could not tell. I moved closer.

  My eyes were not playing tricks on me. The snow was falling on the Goblin Grove in the world above. It was like a window, a view I might have seen from my bedroom back at the inn. I was pierced with a sudden yearning for home. For Josef. For Käthe. Mother and Papa. Even Constanze. I even missed the girl I had been: Liesl the dutiful daughter, the loving older sister, the secret composer. If my life had been stunted, at least I had known my place. What place had I here? Who was I in the Underground? A neglected queen, an unloved, unravished wife. A maiden still. I found rejection wherever I went, even among the goblins.

  My humiliation was still raw and tender within me, so I focused on the enchanted painting instead. The Goblin Grove beckoned, and I reached for the portrait, against the warnings of Twig and Thistle.

  I was startled when my fingers met glass. I leaned forward to examine it, and my breath covered its surface in mist, completely obscuring the Goblin Grove in fog.

  When the mist cleared, the scene had changed. I stumbled backward, tripping over the broken furniture and shattered knickknacks in my chamber. I cut my palm on something sharp, but I scarcely noticed the pain. Instead of the Goblin Grove, a young man sat at a writing desk, scribbling furiously.

  “Sepperl!”

  He did not hear me. Of course he did not hear me. My little brother was taller than when I saw him last—taller, thinner, leaner. He dressed like a gentleman now, his frock coat of pastel blue brocade, his breeches of fine satin, fine lace crowding his throat. He looked prosperous and, I thought with a pang, like a person I would not recognize in passing.

  The door behind him opened, admitting François. Josef’s face brightened, and my breath hitched in my throat. My brother had once looked at me that way, as though I held his soul in my hands. But his soul was no longer in my care; I had been replaced.