Wintersong

  It is great because it is shameful, the voice inside me said again. It is great because it is true.

  I rose from the bed and walked to the retiring room. My weakness did not pass; it grew worse the longer I was awake. I thought about calling for Twig or Thistle, to have them bring me something to eat or drink, but I wanted to be alone. I wanted to cry. I had spent tears of rage, frustration, and sorrow since becoming the Goblin King’s bride, but I hadn’t allowed myself the indulgence of a good sob. The undignified, broken-hearted, mournful wail of ugly tears. The weight of that unreleased cry pressed down upon my lungs and my heart.

  I sat down at the klavier. The cry was there, crawling up the edges of my throat, the corners of my nose and eyes, but it would not free itself. I thought of Mother, of Papa, of Constanze. I thought of Josef, and of Käthe.

  Missing Josef was a stab to my heart, sharp, piercing, a grave and mortal wound. Missing Josef was learning to live without a part of myself, like losing a limb or a hand. How did one live without a limb or a hand? You learned to live around it, to absorb its emptiness as a part of yourself.

  Missing Käthe was yearning for a summer’s day on a winter night. My love for my sister was a constant thing, just as she had been a constant presence in my life, my bedmate since childhood. If Josef was a part of who I was, then Käthe defined me, shaped my borders, filled my negative spaces. She was the sunshine to my darkness, the sweetness to my salty disposition. I knew who I was because I knew who I was not: my sister. Without my sister to define me, I was unsteady, unstable. I had lost the crutch that propped me up.

  I could not let them out. I could not let them go. The ghosts of my family were trapped, and I needed someone to turn me inside out, break me apart, rip me open. Let them out. Let them out. Let them out. I could not do it alone. I needed to unburden myself, push that pain into someone else, relieve myself of the unbearable weight of grief. I needed someone to pull my grief from me, draw the poison from the wound. I needed someone to carry my pain for me. I needed a friend.

  I buried my head in my arms, tears dotting the black and white keys of the klavier, a slow, steady leak that did nothing to relieve the pressure building inside me.

  * * *

  My time in the Underground took on a sort of clockwork of its own: sleep, eat, sleep, wander, sleep, eat, sleep, sit at the klavier, sleep, wander, sleep. I spent much of my time in the abode of the goblins asleep. It seemed a luxury at first, after years of rising before dawn. But in time, not even sleep could pass the time quickly enough. I had my first taste of boredom, and I hated it.

  Twig and Thistle suggested a picnic down by the shores of the Underground lake. We watched the Lorelei emerge and disappear beneath the surface as a group of changelings played on the far side. Unbidden, the memory of Josef’s face with goblin eyes returned to me. I frowned.

  “What are the changelings?” I asked.

  Thistle gave me a sharp look. “Why do you ask, mortal?”

  I could have punished her for not addressing me properly—I was Her Highness—but Thistle, like Constanze, called me whatever she wanted.

  “I’m just curious,” I said. “Are they—are they children? Of the Goblin King?”

  Twig and Thistle laughed, their high-pitched cackles splintering and echoing on the shores of the Underground lake.

  “Children?” Thistle sneered. “No. No union of mortal and Der Erlkönig has ever been fruitful.”

  “Actually—” Twig began, but the other goblin girl cut her off.

  “The changelings are nothing, poor fools,” Thistle said. “Neither fish nor fowl, human nor goblin.”

  “How can that be?” I watched the changelings on the far side skipping rocks, sending luminescent ripples across the surface. In the shifting, mercurial light of the grotto, they seemed more like a ragtag bunch of children than the elegant creatures with whom I had danced at the Goblin Ball. There was an innocence as well as an agelessness about them. They could have been fifteen. They could have been five hundred. “If they aren’t the children of humans and goblins, then what are they?”

  “They are,” Twig said quietly, “the product of a wish.”

  Silence louder than a bell gong rang throughout the grotto. Thistle gave Twig a dark look.

  “A wish?” An image returned to me, half-remembered and mostly forgotten: the sound of my baby brother’s crying in the room down the hall, a plea to save his life.

  One of the changelings, a comely young female, sidled toward me.

  “What did we tell you before, Your Highness?” Twig said. “Whatever the old laws giveth, they also taketh.”

  I nodded.

  “Say you are a young girl,” Twig began. “And the black death is sweeping through the world above, taking with it every man, woman, and child it comes across. You watch your father sicken and die, you watch your mother swell up and bloat, you watch your little brother grow thin and fade away into a wisp. You bury them all, one by one, into the frozen ground and wonder where they have gone. To Heaven? Or someplace worse? So you make a wish—a wish, not a prayer—that you will never suffer their fate. That you can hide where not even the hand of Death can find you.”

  The changeling near me reached out her hand and I took it. She was a sickly little thing, with pointed ears and teeth.

  “Careful,” Thistle said. “They bite.”

  At my touch, the changeling’s entire countenance brightened; the paleness of her cheek no longer pallid, the painful thinness of her body a languid slenderness. The pinched expression on her face smoothed into one of hunger. The changeling breathed deep, and the world around me grew just a little bit darker. I snatched back my hand. Thistle snickered.

  “Say also,” Twig continued, “you are a young man. You are the younger of a beautiful pair of siblings renowned throughout the village for your beauty. Your mother was a beauty in the generation ahead of you, but time has not been as kind to her. She dresses in fashions much younger than are appropriate, cakes her face in powder and rouge. Your older sister is happily married to a wonderful man, until one day, she is stricken with smallpox, leaving her face scarred and her beauty marred forever. So you stare into the mirror and make a wish: to remain young and beautiful for all time.”

  “How sad,” I murmured. Trapped and tormented by your own wishes. I knew intimately how that felt; I was often strangled by the tyranny of my desires.

  “Oh, you of the tender heart,” Thistle sneered. “Don’t waste your pity on them; they brought it on themselves, as all you mortals do.”

  “Can they walk the world above?”

  “No,” said Twig.

  “Then how…” The rest of the question died in my throat, choking on my brother’s name.

  Thistle sniggered, but Twig stared at me with her blank, black eyes. I could read nothing in them, but she heard the unspoken question on my tongue. “The wishes they made were selfish,” she said simply. “Yours was selfless.”

  I did not want to dwell on this uncomfortable thought further. A restlessness overcame me and I rose to my feet. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where, Your Highness?” Twig asked.

  “Somewhere,” I muttered. “Anywhere.”

  I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Boredom and futility pressed on me, and I wanted to rip, shred, tear, scream. But the scream was bottled within me, and I could not let it out. I could not let it out. I could not let it out.

  “Mmmm.” I recoiled when I noticed Thistle’s face hovering over my shoulder. She had climbed up the stone wall of the grotto and was poised over me, breathing deeply as though inhaling the scent of some delicious perfume. “Such strong emotions,” she purred. “Such fire. It’s so warm.”

  “Get away from me.” I shoved her away, and she tumbled down the rock wall to Twig’s crackling laughter.

  Twig’s laugh caught the attention of the changelings, who left off their rock-skipping games and slid toward me, silent and smooth. They had the form and feature of young men and women, bu
t they moved with a sinuous grace that was not of the world above.

  As they drew closer, the changelings brightened. Their faces shone with vivid expressions; their movements became more animated and less preternatural. I reached for them. Their features—both familiar and foreign—reminded me of my own human ones. I longed for them. I longed to be among them like they were kin.

  One of the changelings, a young man—a youth—took my hand in his. He nuzzled his face into my palm. My heart softened and I wanted to hold this changeling. I yearned to draw comfort from his presence, the way I would have turned to Käthe or Josef. The changeling even looked a little like Josef: the same high cheekbones and sharp chin, the same heart-shaped face.

  He snapped at my fingers.

  “Ouch!” I cried. The changeling had managed to draw blood.

  “Didn’t I say they bite?” Thistle giggled cruelly.

  The changelings took up her laughter. It sounded like one laugh, broken into a myriad pieces, echoing against each other into a cacophony of mocking jeers. The changeling licked my blood off his hands.

  Long, spindly fingers wrapped themselves around my ankles like brambles in a hedge. Twig. A sickening expression crossed her face, half of hunger and half of pity. No, I thought. No. Not Twig. Not her too.

  Goblin and changeling lurched closer, the scent of my blood drawing them to me like moths to the flame. The intensity of my emotions, my mortal life, sustained them. Fed them. Fueled them. I kicked out, trying to shake them off, but they clung tighter than burrs.

  “Stop,” I said. “Please, stop!”

  But they were gone, their black eyes blank in a haze of hunger. I wrenched Thistle’s fingers off the skirt of my dress, pried myself from Twig’s grip, but they were relentless. Skittering from the shadows came other goblins, the flickering waves of my fear drawing them out of the darkness.

  This is it, I thought. This is how I die. Unremembered, unsung, torn apart by ravenous hands.

  A blast of anger returned strength to my limbs. Beyond the edges of panic and fear, there was clarity. There was sharpness. This would not be how I died. If I were to die, it would not be in this ignominious way. If I were to die, I would choose how. Was I not the Goblin Queen? My subjects were bound by my desire, by my wishes.

  “Enough.”

  My word was my command. They froze, bound by my will and the wish I hadn’t needed to speak aloud. Not anymore. I pushed them all away, and they toppled over where they stood. I stepped on their fingers out of spite, hearing the bones snap like twigs underfoot. They flinched with pain, and I relished the agony on their faces. I wanted them to fear me, to be afraid to trespass upon my person.

  It wasn’t just the goblins. It was everyone. The Goblin King. Master Antonius. Papa’s condescension. Hans’s bored expression whenever I left him to practice on the klavier. The incredulous looks on the villagers’ faces when they remembered that I, too, had talent. I even wanted to rise above Josef’s shadow on my music. I wanted to bend the entire world—both above and below—to what I needed. For once. Just once.

  Just once.

  Light my flame, mein Herr, I thought. Light my fire, and watch me burn.

  MERCY

  “You are not attending, my dear,” the Goblin King said from the klavier.

  I looked up from my glass of wine, the stem of which I had been listlessly twirling between my fingers for the past several minutes. An open book sat on my lap, but I had not read a single word in the past hour.

  “Hmmm?” I quickly turned the pages. “I am.”

  The Goblin King raised a brow. “I’ve stump-fingered my way through three pieces and you’ve not said anything about the notes.”

  I coughed to hide the blush creeping up my neck.

  Since that first, disastrous evening after dinner, our time together had taken on a comfortable, almost comforting routine. Sometimes we would pass the time by reading aloud to each other. I preferred poetry, but the Goblin King—unsurprisingly—preferred his philosophers. He read Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and German, and spoke a dozen other languages as well. He was astonishingly well learned; he might have been a scholar in the world above.

  On other occasions, the Goblin King would play some short pieces on the klavier while I read by the fire. Those were my favorite evenings, when music, not words, filled the silence between us. Tonight my husband played a few Scarlatti sonatinen while I took up a volume of Italian poetry. I did not read Italian, and only understood as much as I needed to know how quickly, how slowly, or how elegantly I ought to play a piece of music. The book was for show; it allowed me to watch the Goblin King from beneath lowered lashes under the pretense of reading.

  After that first evening, he never invited me to play my music for him again.

  In the beginning, it had been a relief. But as the evenings wore on, the relief turned into guilt, then annoyance, then anger. He was so maddeningly, infuriatingly complacent. He was so assured I would come to him of my own volition, that I would break and lay my music at his feet like a gift, that he could afford to watch me from the klavier with that distant, compassionate look on his face.

  But he was wrong. I was already broken, and the music was still trapped inside. It prickled, tickled, and itched in my gut, threatening to claw out of my throat in a scream.

  “Is everything all right, Elisabeth?”

  No, everything was not all right. It had not been all right since I became Der Erlkönig’s bride, since he stole my sister away, since he gave me that flute in the marketplace, since before I could remember. It had not been all right since I locked my music away, both in my box and in my heart.

  But I could not tell him so. “I’m fine,” I said instead.

  His gaze sharpened, the pupils of his eyes dilating to drown the gray and green in black. The Goblin King knew how to interpret my breaths before pauses, the lengths of my measures of rest, my caesuras of speech. He followed my cues as attentively as a musician in an orchestra, waiting for the maestro to take the lead. And he knew whenever I broke tempo.

  His eyes swept me from head to toe, lingering on my exposed shoulders and arms, the expanse of my collarbones and décolletage. “What’s the matter?”

  I suppose I had not been particularly subtle. For the first time, I had taken care with my appearance; after the encounter by the Underground lake, I had forced Twig and Thistle to take me to the tailor to stitch me a new gown. To stitch me some armor. I had had the tailor modify a gown made of a beautiful cream and gold silk taffeta. It was fashioned like a chemise, the skirt gathered beneath what little bosom I had before flowing out behind me in a train. The entire construction was held together by diaphanous straps at my shoulders, leaving my arms bare. Diamonds were craftily sewn into the bodice—hundreds, thousands, a myriad—twinkling like stars in a night sky. Twig and Thistle arranged my hair into a coronet of braids about my head, fitted with more little diamonds that sparkled brightly against my dark locks. For the first time, I found myself hoping the Goblin King would find me pretty.

  It seemed ridiculous; I was plain and he was gorgeous, but the desire that throbbed between us was real and had nothing to do with beauty or the lack thereof. And it was there, always there, smothering me, strangling me, until I could not breathe for wanting.

  So I answered the Goblin King’s question the only way I could. “Do you not like my new dress?” I blurted out.

  That certainly surprised him. “I—uh—what?”

  “My dress,” I said. “Is it not to your liking?”

  His eyes were both bewildered and wary. “It is lovely, Elisabeth.”

  “And me? Am I lovely?”

  The Goblin King frowned. “You are in a mood tonight, my dear.”

  He had not answered me. Suddenly I could not bear to remain seated. I rose to my feet and paced back and forth before the fire. I was in a mood—for a fight.

  “Answer me,” I said. “Do you think me lovely?”

  “Not with the way you’re acti
ng at the moment.”

  I laughed, a nigh hysterical sound. “You sound like my father. It’s a simple question, mein Herr.”

  “Is it?” The Goblin King gave me a sharp look. “Then tell me, my dear, what would you like to hear? The simple answer, or the honest one?”

  I trembled, although whether it was from hurt or fear, I did not know. “The truth,” I said. “You’re the one who showed me that the ugly truth is preferable to a pretty lie.”

  It was a while before he spoke. “I think you know the answer, Elisabeth,” he said in a low voice.

  I closed my eyes to stop the tears. Despite everything, I had hoped it would be different. That his desire could somehow make me lovely, could transform me from a sparrow into a peacock.

  “Then why?” My voice tripped over the jagged edges of my sorrow. “Why do you want me?”

  “I’ve answered this before, Elisabeth, I—”

  “Yes, yes, I’ve heard it all before. You loved the music in me. My soul is a beautiful thing. Once I give you myself, entire, you’ll—” I hiccoughed. “You’ll give yourself, entire.”

  The Goblin King said nothing, only watched me with his mismatched gaze.

  “But that means nothing to me, mein Herr. Your words mean nothing to a queer, unlovely little girl.”

  There was a scrape across the floor as the Goblin King pushed back the bench to get to his feet. His treads were light and nearly soundless, a wolf’s in the snow. Yet I could sense him cross the space between us. He placed a hand upon my brow.

  “Loveliness of the spirit is worth more than loveliness of the flesh,” he said gently. “You know that.”

  I opened my eyes and slapped his hand away. I felt the shock of that slap reverberate through both our bodies, from his startled expression to the stinging of my palm.