Wintersong

  I set to composing.

  Picking up a quill and dipping it in ink, I marked down the basic melody as swiftly as I could onto a fresh sheet of paper. I also added the notes I had made about ideas for supporting accompaniment, time signatures, et al. Once I was certain I had collected all my thoughts from my wedding gown, I let it fall to the floor. The dress had served its purpose.

  I did not know about Haydn or Mozart or Gluck or Handel or any of the other composers whose names I had studied, whose pieces I had played as a child, but music did not flow from my mind like dictation from God. It was said Mozart never made fair copies of his work, that no foul papers existed, for it was all perfect from his mind to the page.

  Not so for Maria Elisabeth Ingeborg Vogler. Each note, each phrase, each chord was an agony of labor, to be revised again and again. I relied on the klavier to tell me which note I wanted, to figure out which inversion I needed. I was not Josef, to have this store of knowledge readily accessible; I had to test and sound out everything I heard in my head.

  I loved it. This work was mine, and mine alone.

  Ink spattered my fingers and the keys of the klavier, but I was oblivious to everything, even the scratch of the quill against paper. I heard only the music in my mind. For once there was nothing of Josef, nothing of Papa, nothing of the sour voice within that sounded like judgment, like fear. There was nothing but this, nothing but music and me, me, me.

  There was another presence in the room.

  I had been working for nearly an hour or so, but it was only in the past few minutes that I had noticed another person in the retiring room with me. His presence slowly seeped into my consciousness, emerging from the depths of my thoughts like a dream. I had been unable to untangle my sense of self from my sense of the Goblin King. I lifted my head.

  The Goblin King stood on the threshold between his bedchamber and the retiring room. The path between his room and mine was now connected. He was simply dressed, looking less like a sovereign than a shepherd boy. If he had had a hat, he would have wrung it in his fingers sheepishly. He hovered in the in-between spaces, awaiting my permission to enter. I could not make out the expression on his face.

  He cleared his throat. “Are you—are you all right, my queen?”

  So distant. So formal. He always called me my dear, said in that sarcastic tone of his, or else it was Elisabeth, always Elisabeth. He was the only one who called me that, and I wanted to be Elisabeth for him again.

  “I am fine, thank you, mein Herr.” I matched his distance with my own. The chasm between us grew to twice its size. I ached to bridge it, but did not know how. We had been connected in ways so much more intimate than this. How much more could you bare of yourself when you’d already given everything?

  He looked away as soon as my eyes met his. A queer feeling overcame me when I realized I had caught my husband in a moment of unguarded admiration. Admiration. Of me. I felt as though he had walked in on me undressed. Yet he had seen me undressed. My mind, tidied into its proper spaces, fell back into disarray.

  “How long have you been there?” I asked.

  The words came out like an accusation. The Goblin King stiffened.

  “Long enough,” was all he said. “Do you mind?”

  Liesl would have minded.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t mind. Please, sit.”

  He gave me a grave nod and the slightest sliver of a smile. As ever, the tips of his pointed teeth poked through that smile, but it wasn’t as threatening as before. He walked to the chaise longue and sat down, leaning back and closing his eyes as I continued to muddle through the piece.

  This was intimacy of an entirely different sort. He was inside me, part of me, in the spirit as well as the flesh. At first I thought I was merely giving him a glimpse into my mind, but before long I realized the Goblin King was already in my head. He offered a suggestion here, a revision there, all so deftly and subtly that his voice became mine. With Josef, composing had been something I gave him, something he took and shaped into the finished product. But with the Goblin King, music was something we molded together, just as we had done when I was a child.

  I remembered now. All my memories of him came flooding back, ripped from the tide gates by my release. Sweeping away the cobwebs of shame and disappointment, our friendship shone shiny and new. We had danced together in the Goblin Grove, had sung together, had made music together. After I finished a piece, I would rush into the forest to meet the Goblin King. To share my music with him. As I had until my father told me to grow up.

  I’m so sorry, I thought. I’m so sorry I betrayed you.

  My hands shook on the klavier. The Goblin King opened his eyes.

  “Is everything all right?”

  I smiled at him, really, truly smiled at him. Warmth filled me, a soft, tickling sensation. It was a long moment before I recognized the emotion for what it was: happiness. I was happy. I could not remember the last time I had been happy.

  “What?” He was suddenly bashful.

  “Nothing,” I said, but my smile grew broader.

  “It’s never nothing with you.” But he smiled too, and its sweetness hurt. He looked years younger with that smile. He was entirely that soft-eyed young man now, no trace of Der Erlkönig in his face.

  “Sometimes,” I said, shaking my head, “I wish you didn’t know me so well.”

  He laughed. There were no sharp edges to him anymore. The mood changed between us, growing heavier, weightier. We continued working in silence, but thoughts and feelings flowed between us without words, the push and pull, ebb and flow of the music gently rocking us with its sound.

  Our conversation wound to a close as I finished working through the theme.

  “Beautiful,” the Goblin King murmured. “Transcendent. It—it’s bigger than Heaven and the world above. Just like you.”

  Roses bloomed in my cheeks, and I averted my head so he would not see.

  “You could change the course of music,” he said. “You could change the world above if you—”

  He did not finish his sentence. If I—what? Published my music? Managed to get past the barriers of my name, my sex, my death? My final fate hung between us, an invisible but insurmountable obstacle. I would not change the course of music. I would die here, unheard and unremembered. I tasted the unfairness at the back of my throat, bitterness and bile.

  “If the world above were ready for me, perhaps,” I said lightly. “But I fear I am too much for them—and not enough.”

  “You, my dear,” the Goblin King said, “are more than enough.”

  The compliment from another’s lips would have sounded coy, flirtatious, even arch. A pretty sentiment designed to flatter and then bed me. I had heard such blandishments from guests in our inn, directed even to one as plain as me. Yet I did not think the Goblin King intended to flatter; on his lips, the words sounded like unvarnished truth. I was more than enough. More than my limitations, more than adequate, simply more.

  “Thank you.” If I had been Käthe, I would have deflected the compliment with a coquettish wink or a snide remark. But I was not Käthe; I was plain, blunt, and forthright Liesl. No. Elisabeth. Plain, earnest, straightforward, and talented Elisabeth. I took his words for the gift they were, and for the first time, accepted them without pain.

  After a long while—hours? minutes?—the first movement of what I was beginning to call the Wedding Night Sonata was done. Despite the anger and rage in its notes, the key was C major. The shape of the first movement was there now, with most of its supporting structure fleshed out. I played it on the klavier to hear it in full, but I could not adequately convey both the main part and the accompaniment with just two hands.

  Instinctively, I reached for Josef. But my brother was not there.

  A sharp pain stabbed me in the heart, as though someone had taken a dagger and plunged it into my breast. I gasped and pressed my hand there to stanch the wound. I was certain my hand would come away with blood. But there was no
thing there.

  “Elisabeth!” The Goblin King rushed to my side.

  It was a moment before I could recover enough breath to speak.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m fine.” I shook off his solicitous hands and gave him a wobbly smile. “Just a fit. It will pass.”

  His face was unreadable, opaque, as inscrutable as any one of his goblin subjects. “Perhaps you should rest.”

  I shook my head. “No. Not yet. I need to hear this in its entirety. As a whole. It’s just,” I said with a wry smile, “I lack another pair of hands.”

  His expression softened. “Perhaps I—perhaps I can assist you. With your music.”

  I stared at him. The Goblin King turned away.

  “Never mind,” he said hastily. “Just a thought. Forget it; I didn’t mean to offend you—”

  “Yes.”

  He stopped and lifted his head, looking straight into my eyes.

  “Yes, you may,” I corrected. “Please,” I said, when I saw the uncertainty in his face. “I would like to hear this piece played on a violin.”

  We held each other’s gazes for a beat longer. Then he blinked.

  “Your wish is my command, Elisabeth.” He smiled. “I always did say you had power over me.”

  Elisabeth. I was Elisabeth again, and the way he said my name sent a throb of longing through me.

  “As you wish, Elisabeth,” he said again, softer now. “As you wish.”

  Part IV

  THE GOBLIN KING

  When all my hopes His promises sufficed,

  When my Soul watched for Him by day, by night,

  When my lamp lightened and my robe was white,

  And all seemed loss, except the Pearl unpriced.

  Yet, since He calls me still with tender Call,

  Since He remembers Whom I half forgot,

  I even will run my race and bear my lot.

  —CHRISTINA ROSSETTI, Come Unto Me

  DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

  Everything was changed. Ever since the night the Goblin King broke me open and laid me bare, the air between us was charged with unspoken emotion. I was a woman remade by his hands; he reached inside me and the music came pouring out.

  I understood now what it was like to be struck by divine fire. Our evenings now passed in a fever dream, where we did nothing but make music. I no longer marked the passage of time; yesterday was today was tomorrow, an ouroboros of hours that circled back on themselves. I was burning from within, and I needed no mortal sustenance to nourish me. Sleep, food, drink—all were poor substitutes for the music that sustained me. I lived on music and the Goblin King. The notes were my ambrosia, his kisses my nectar.

  “Again,” I demanded as we finished playing the first movement of the Wedding Night Sonata for the seventh time. “Again!”

  We had been working on the piece for hours, my husband and I. Every time he played it, I heard and understood something different within the movement. Within me. A piece begun in rage and impotence, transformed into inexorable longing, and yet, not a piece without joy.

  I had marked its tempo as allegro.

  To be played quickly. Swiftly.

  Joyfully.

  “Again?” the Goblin King asked. “Have you not had enough music, my dear?”

  He was tired. I could hear fear in his playing, fear and fatigue. I had worn him down. I had worn myself down. But I did not care; I did not want to stop. The cage about my heart had been opened and I was flying. I was free for the first time in my life, and my soul soared. I could not play, could not compose, could not think fast enough; my mind outpaced my fingers, and the errors and wrong notes that ensued caused me as much laughter as tears. More, I wanted more, I needed more. If Lucifer’s sin was pride, then mine was covetousness. More and more and more. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

  “No,” I said. “Never.”

  “Slow down, Elisabeth,” he laughed. “I doubt even God Himself could keep up with you.”

  “Let Him try.” The blood fizzed in my veins. “I shall outpace even His angels in a footrace!”

  “Darling, darling.” The Goblin King lowered his arms to let them rest. “Let it be. The first movement is magnificent.”

  I smiled. It was magnificent. I was magnificent. No, I was more than magnificent; I was invincible.

  “It is,” I said. “And it could be even greater.” My hands trembled, fingers twitching. I was nervy, excitable, a hound before the chase. Once more, just once more …

  The Goblin King saw me shaking and frowned. I snatched my hands from the keyboard and hid them in my skirts.

  “Elisabeth, enough.”

  “But there is still so much work to do,” I protested. “The theme is sound but the middle passages are—oh!”

  A drop of blood fell on the ivory keys. Puzzled, I wiped it away, when another drop fell on my hand. Then another. And another. The Goblin King rushed forward and pressed a kerchief to my nose. Red stained the snow-white linen, blooming across the fabric at an alarming rate. Suddenly, the world wound down and time slowed to a halt. My thoughts, a fleet-footed hart running through the woods of my mind, stumbled and fell.

  Blood?

  “Rest.” The word was as much a command as a caress. The Goblin King clapped his hands, and Twig and Thistle appeared, one holding a glass tumbler, the other a bottle of a rich amber liquor. He poured me a drink and handed it to me without another word.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Brandy.”

  “What for?”

  “Just drink it.”

  I wrinkled my nose, but took a sip, feeling the burn of the liquor slide down my throat and warm my heart. He watched me carefully as I finished the drink.

  “There,” he said. “Feel better?”

  I blinked. To my surprise, I did. My hands, which had shaken and twitched with years of pent-up frustration, were finally still. I reached up to touch my face. My nosebleed had stopped, and so had the torrent of song that had flooded from me in the past few days.

  “Now.” The Goblin King took away the glass and sat beside me on the bench. “We’ve been playing your music for a long time. Let us pass the time in other ways.”

  He took my face in his hands and leaned in close, concern in those remarkable eyes. The tenderness there undid me, and a fire of an entirely different sort blossomed within me. The Goblin King gently stroked my cheek and I closed my eyes to breathe him in.

  “Have you any suggestions, mein Herr?”

  His lips brushed against my ear. “I have a few ideas.”

  I was wound tighter than a violin string, pitched too sharp, and I urged his rough, callused fingertips lower, loosening me, tuning me to the right key.

  “We could put down the quill and the bow, and play each other instead,” I murmured.

  The Goblin King paused and drew back. I opened my eyes to meet his gaze, but instead of desire, I saw something else: worry.

  The longer you burn the candle …

  Suddenly, the bloodstained handkerchief seemed like an omen.

  But I pushed the foreboding away. I was happy. I was fulfilled. I had music at my fingertips and a willing performer at my beck and call. The Goblin King was a consummate player of violins and of women, and the skill with which he plied both was extraordinary. My arms, my breasts, my stomach, my thighs; he could wring such exquisite emotion from me with just the softest flick of his tongue, the merest touch of his lips. I was in the hands of a virtuoso.

  So I kissed him, kissed him with ardor and heat, burning away his worry and my doubt. I felt his concern warm into something altogether more pleasurable beneath my lips, and I traced my hands down his arms, drawing him close.

  I let the Goblin King play me the rest of the evening, the sonata, the bloodstained handkerchief, and the candle forgotten for the time being. He was the bow, I the strings, and his fingers brushed my body to make me sing.

  * * *

  The Goblin King was gone when I awoke. At some
point during the night he had put me to bed, but had not joined me there. Where my husband went in his private hours, I did not know, but I thought I could hear the distant, dreamy sound of his violin.

  The mirror above my mantel showed the Goblin Grove bathed in an eerie half-light, either dawn or dusk, I could not tell. The alders were in full bloom in the world above, awakened to spring before the rest of the forest. I smiled and rose from my bed.

  The retiring room was empty.

  “He’s not here,” said a cackle from the shadows. Thistle.

  “I know.” The Goblin King had not taken his violin from its stand in the retiring room. It rested in the hands of a leering satyr, its clawed fingers running down the curves of the instrument. Yet I could still hear those faint, ghostly strains, familiar yet unrecognizable. “Do you hear that?”

  Thistle’s bat-wing ears twitched. “Hear what?”

  “The music,” I said. I ran my fingers over the Goblin King’s violin. “I thought it was Der Erlkönig.”

  We listened. The playing was too faint for me to identify what I was hearing, but Thistle’s ears were sharper than mine. After a moment, she shook her head.

  “I hear nothing.”

  Did she lie? It would be like my goblin girl to mislead me, but Thistle watched me with an unreadable expression on her face, neither mocking nor sympathetic. For once, I thought she might be telling the truth.

  Perhaps it was all in my mind. I heard music in my mind at all times, but it was never quite this literal. This music wasn’t within me; it was beyond me.

  Thistle watched me, perched atop the klavier like a cat, her sharp little claws scoring marks into the scattered notes I had made on the Wedding Night Sonata. “What do you want?” she sneered.

  If it had been Twig attending, she would have brought me a platter of food, a mug of tea, a new robe, or any other number of small creature comforts without my having to ask. But Thistle chafed at my unspoken wishes, finding ways to fulfill my orders to the letter if not in spirit.

  My stomach rumbled. For the first time in ages, I realized I was hungry. More than hungry, I was starving. I swayed on my feet, suddenly lightheaded.