Wintersong

  “It would be nice,” I said mildly, “if you could find me something to eat.”

  Thistle scowled. I hid a smile; she hated it more when I was nice than when I was demanding. She snapped those spindly-branch fingers and presently, changelings materialized out of the shadows with plates piled high with roasted boar, slices of venison, turnips, and bread. I noted a salver of strawberries in one of the servitors’ hands and my mouth watered.

  “The food isn’t…?” I gave Thistle a questioning glance.

  “No glamour,” she said. “It doesn’t work on the Goblin Queen anyway.”

  I needed no further encouragement. The changelings disappeared into the shadows again and I tucked in with gusto, devouring the food before me with no thought for the niceties. The juice from the roast filled my mouth, rich and flavorful. I could taste the sweetness of rosemary, sage, and thyme, the smokiness of the roasting fire, the saltiness of the crust.

  “You’ve still got an appetite,” Thistle remarked. “Surprising.”

  I paused mid-bite. “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “They all stopped eating in the end.”

  I said nothing and continued eating.

  “Are you not curious?” Thistle asked when it became clear I wouldn’t rise to her bait. “Curious about your fate?”

  I tore off a piece of bread. “What else is there to know? My life is given to the Underground, and I may never again set foot in the land of the living.” I thought of the days spent at the klavier, the nights spent in the Goblin King’s hands, and my cheeks warmed. “I am dead to the world above.”

  The longer you burn the candle …

  The food stuck in my throat, but I forced myself to swallow it down.

  Thistle brought the salver of strawberries over to me. “You know what your bargain entails, but not what it portends.” She grinned, her teeth jagged and sharp.

  I sighed. “Out with it, Thistle,” I said. “You want to tell me, so go ahead.”

  She set the salver at my feet. “The first fruits of your sacrifice,” she said, picking up a strawberry in her long, many-jointed fingers. “Interesting. Early in the year for strawberries. Your favorite?”

  I thought of the wild strawberry patch in the meadow by the inn. I was born in midsummer, and the patch always bore fruit by my birthday. It would be a race to see who could eat more: me, my sister, or the creatures of the forest. Käthe and I would steal away from our chores as often as we could to fill our bellies, our red-stained mouths always giving us away.

  “Yes.” I loved strawberries because they tasted of more than sweetness; they tasted of stolen summer afternoons and laughter. “They were always my favorite birthday gift.”

  Thistle laughed. “First to bloom, first to fade. Enjoy your strawberries while you can, then; the taste will soon fade to ash in your mouth.”

  “How so?” I picked up the salver and set it on my lap.

  “Do know what it means to live, Your Highness?” I rolled my eyes. I was plagued on all sides by philosophers. “Life is more than breath and more than blood. It is”—Thistle ate her strawberry with relish—“taste and touch and sight and sound and smell.”

  I looked at the salver in my lap. Each berry was at its peak ripeness, its flesh a perfect bright red.

  “The price you paid was not the remaining years of your life, you know. Think you the old laws could be bought so cheaply? No. It is not just your heart, but your eyes, your ears, your nose, and your tongue they demand.” She licked the sticky juice from her fingers. “Little by little, they will take your sight, your smell, your taste, your touch, a slow feast. Your passion, your vivacity, your capacity to feel, all sucked dry. And when you are nothing but a faded shade of your former self, then at last, you will die. Think you your beating heart the greatest gift you could give? No, mortal, your heartbeat is but the least and last.”

  The ugliness of Thistle’s truth left me breathless. I felt sick; I could not stomach another bite.

  “Oh yes,” she went on, plucking another berry from the tray. “One by one, your senses will leave you. Which of them can you bear to give up first, mortal?”

  Which of them? None of them. Could I give up the taste of strawberries? The perfume of a summer’s evening, the feel of silk against my skin, the privilege of beholding the Goblin King with my own eyes? The taste of his kisses, the touch of his hands skimming the hills and valleys of my curves, the sound of his violin? And music, oh, God, music, would I ever be able to bear the agony of its loss?

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know.”

  Thistle stole another strawberry from my salver. “Then eat, drink, and be merry while you can, for tomorrow…” She did not need to finish her sentence.

  For the first time in a long time, I felt the weight, the enormity, of what I had sacrificed. I had spent so long in the world above denying myself that I knew just how well the loss of my senses would devastate and diminish me. Especially now that I understood the fullness of what the body could offer.

  “How long?” I asked. “How long before—before it all fades away?”

  Thistle shrugged. “You have as long as memory holds, I suppose.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Thistle’s eyes glittered. “Do you know what keeps the wheel of life turning, mortal?”

  I was taken aback by this sudden turn in the conversation. “No.”

  My goblin girl grinned, but it was a malicious grin, full of contempt and ridicule. “Love.”

  I gave a disbelieving laugh. “What?”

  “I know, what a foolish notion. But it doesn’t make it any less powerful, or true.” Thistle leaned forward, breathing deep my sorrow, anger, and confusion. “As long as the world above remembers you, as long as you have a reason to love, your taste and touch and smell and sight and sound shall remain to you.”

  I frowned. In the distance, I could still hear the violin playing its unidentifiable but familiar song, like a beacon, like a call.

  “You mean, as long as someone remembers me, I will live, entire?”

  Thistle watched me. “Do they love you?”

  I thought of Josef, and of Käthe. “Yes.”

  “And how long do you think their love will last, when all trace of you that ever was is gone, when their rational, waking minds tell them you don’t exist, when it would be easier to forget you in the face of reason?”

  I closed my eyes. I remembered the strange half-dream of a life granted to me by Der Erlkönig when Käthe had been first taken from me. It had been easy, so easy to slip into that version of reality, a reality where my sister did not exist. But I remembered too the wrongness of it all, that despite all evidence to the contrary, the hole in my heart could only be explained by her absence. I thought of Josef then, and my heart clenched with fear. My baby brother, the other half of my soul, had gone on to bigger and better things. It would be so easy to forget me in the midst of all that fine company. But the piece of a dream returned to me, sheet music open on a stand. Für meine Lieben, in Lied im stil die Bagatelle, auch Der Erlkönig.

  I opened my eyes. “Their love will last as long as they draw breath,” I said fiercely.

  Thistle scoffed. “So they all say.”

  We fell into silence. I could still hear that damnable faraway violin, but Thistle seemed oblivious to its strains. I picked up a strawberry from the salver and brought it to my lips, savoring its scent, the hint of summer sunshine beneath its red sweetness. I took a bite, and its flavor burst over my tongue, flooding me with memories. Me and Mother making strawberry jam as Constanze baked a cake. Käthe’s lips pink with contraband sweets. Josef’s fingers sticky with sugar, leaving marks across the neck of his violin that took ages to clean off.

  And with a start I realized I recognized the music that played in the distance. A queer, haunting little tune, almost like a bagatelle.

  It was mine.

  And the violin was Josef’s.

  I cast aside the re
mnants of my meal and walked to the klavier. Thistle remained with me, a little homunculus hovering over my shoulder, pesky and persistent. I shooed her away, so she sent my papers flying out of spite. I gave her a pointed look, but she stared back mulishly until I mouthed I wish. With a harrumph, she snapped her fingers, and my notes and papers immediately arranged themselves into a neat pile beside the klavier.

  But instead of continuing work on the Wedding Night Sonata, I sat down and played the piece I had called Der Erlkönig, accompanying my brother from another world, another realm.

  As long as the world above remembers you.

  My music. Of course. All things on this earth and beneath it passed away, but music was immortal. Even if I was dead to the world above, a part of me would live each time my music was heard.

  Thistle brought the salver of strawberries and set it atop the klavier, bright, red, and tempting. I ate every last one, grateful for the little sweetnesses that remained to me.

  PERCHANCE TO DREAM

  When I awoke, it was with Josef.

  I stood in an unfamiliar room, beautifully appointed and richly furnished. My brother sat at a writing desk in a nightshirt and cap. The hour was late, and the candles burned low beside him. His fingers, ink-stained and dirty, were wrapped around a quill, laboriously scratching words onto paper.

  “Dear Liesl,” he said.

  A letter. Josef was writing me a letter.

  “Six months since I left home, and still no word.” He paused, waiting for his hand to catch up to his words. “Where are you, Liesl? Why do you not write?”

  Sepperl, Sepperl, mein Brüderchen, I am here, I said. But I was once again voiceless, mute and silent.

  My brother lifted his head, as though he could sense my presence. Josef! I cried. Sepp! But his eyes went dull a moment later, and he returned to his letter.

  “Mother sends letters by the week, and Käthe writes by the hour, but of you, and from you, there is nothing.”

  I watched my brother struggle with the quill. A bow had always looked so natural in his hand; Josef wielded it with such delicacy, his wrist loose, his movements fluid. But the quill was strangled in his fingertips, the motions of writing and transcription awkward and strange. I wondered then if this was not part of the reason my brother had always preferred that I take dictation in his rare fits of composition—because he could not write.

  I staggered back. My brother could not write. He had learned his letters at Mother’s feet like the rest of us children, and he could certainly read, but Papa—obsessed with the makings of another little Mozart—had taken Josef away, making my brother practice the musical alphabet instead.

  Josef dipped his quill in the well and touched the nib to paper—careful, slow, and deliberate. His letters were ill-formed and childish, and I saw that he hadn’t even learned to join them properly into up and downstrokes.

  “I ponder the reasons why you keep silent, and none of them make sense. It is like you are a ghost, a shade. It is like you don’t exist. But how can that be so? How can you be a ghost, when I hold the proof of your existence in my hands?”

  He glanced to the side. The piece I’d named Der Erlkönig lay open in a portfolio on a low table, my handwriting stark in the flickering candlelight.

  “Wherever you are, I hope you knew the moment I released your music into the world, when I played your Der Erlkönig piece in public for the first time. I wish you had seen the faces of the audience. They were transported”—he scribbled out the word—“transformed by your music. I wish you had heard their cries of Encore! Encore! It wasn’t me they were cheering, Liesl; it was you. Your music.”

  I was crying. I did not know a ghost could cry.

  “François insists we try and get the piece published. He thinks it is a work of genius. He is clever and I trust his judgment.”

  Josef glanced over his shoulder, his eyes turning soft and tender. I followed his gaze. François slept on the couch in the room, his arm thrown over his eyes.

  “But I do not want to proceed without your permission. I want to know this is what you want.”

  Yes, I cried. Yes!

  “François does not understand my delay. He does not seem to understand that it is you who holds the power. So I await your word every day, every hour, proof incontrovertible of my older, more talented sister’s existence. My partner-in-arms, my connection to the Underground.”

  I longed to wrap my arms around him, my Sepperl, my darling baby brother and partner-in-arms. But my hands passed through him and my heart broke. I could never again set foot in the world above, never again embrace my family.

  “We are settled in Paris now, so please, please, please write to me, care of Master Antonius.” His hand shook, turning Master Antonius’s name into an illegible scrawl. Josef swore in French.

  “I do not love Paris, although I don’t imagine that surprises you. If you’ve gotten my other letters, you will know how much I miss our little inn and the Goblin Grove, despite all the impressive sights of the great cities of Europe. I keep thinking how much Käthe would love it—it’s all fancy balls and dignitaries and people dressed up in frippery and finery. I am ill-suited to this life, Liesl. The travel takes its toll, and I am constantly weak. We scarcely had time to recover from our journeys before it was another concert, another salon.”

  As Josef wrote that last word, something within him seemed to change. A great sigh left his body, and he seemed to grow smaller, weaker somehow. Travel and time had taken the last of the baby fat from my brother’s face, honing his cheekbones, sharpening his chin. It was only then I realized that Josef looked ill. Drained.

  “My homesickness affects my playing. I know it, and Master Antonius knows it.”

  He pressed down harder on the nib of his quill as he wrote Master Antonius’s name, much harder than necessary.

  “The old violinist is a great performer and I have learned much studying with him. But he isn’t patient, not like you or François, and he…”

  Josef stopped writing, struggling with the words. But I could see what he could not say. The tense set of his shoulders. The way his lower lip and jaw jutted out with stubbornness. The way he kept glancing at François, as though the black boy were both his shield and his refuge. He crossed out the last few words and continued.

  “Nobody understands. François does his best, but while he understands my heart, I can’t always find the words to tell him what I feel. He’s so clever; he can speak French, Italian, and even a little English. But he finds German difficult, and I am a dunce with languages, according to Master Antonius.”

  My hands tightened into fists. I should have known—I had known—on the night of Josef’s audition that Master Antonius was not the mentor my brother needed. That vain, selfish man would never raise my brother up; he would only put him down.

  “The world outside our little sphere, far from the Goblin Grove, is hopelessly mundane. There is no magic, no enchantment. I feel severed from the land of my birth, and I can feel my talent fade and grow dull. I feel blinded, deafened, muted. The only time I feel connected to the earth again is when I play your music.”

  Josef paused again, and set his quill down. He stared out the window, a dreamy expression on his face. His left fingers moved up and down an invisible fingerboard, while his right hand moved in smooth, practiced motions. I thought he had finished writing, but Josef picked up the quill and began again.

  “I dream of our family often—Käthe and Constanze and Mother and Papa. But never you. You are never there. It’s like you don’t exist sometimes. Sometimes I fear you are a figment of my imagination, but the music beside me tells me you are real. I fear I am going mad.”

  His fingers gripped the edge of his writing desk so hard, his knuckles turned white.

  “I dream of our family, but at other times, I dream of a tall, elegant stranger.” Josef glanced at the slumbering François with a look of guilt on his face. “He says nothing, only stands there, hooded and shadowed. I am fil
led with both terror and relief at the sight of him. I beg him to reveal his face to me, but whenever he pulls back his hood, he is me. I am the tall, elegant stranger.”

  If I had breath, it would have been knocked from me. Something terrible was at work here. Something ancient. Something beyond my understanding.

  “I wish you would come, Liesl. I wish you would come and bring the magic and music with you. If you cannot come yourself, then send the next best thing. Send me your music. I am so lost without you, without our connection to the Underground.”

  I tried to gather my brother in my arms, but like the ghost I was, I only passed through him, nothing more than a breeze in the chamber. Josef looked up again, frowning as the candle flame flickered before him.

  “Your ever-loving brother,” he finished. “Sepperl.”

  He lightly sanded the still-wet ink and set the letter out to dry. Then he picked up his candle in its holder and walked over to François. Josef spread a blanket over the sleeping boy’s form and stood there a moment, watching him sleep. Tenderness, affection, and anguish, all in one. It was a look of love.

  Then the scene broke into pieces, shattering and falling about me like shards of glass. A mirror.

  A dream.

  * * *

  There were tears upon my face when I gasped myself awake. My heart raced, and I was both too hot and too cold, my night shift soaked with sweat, my skin clammy. Although it was spring in the world above, down in the Underground it was always cool, as though Der Erlkönig carried eternal winter with him wherever he went.

  A fire was banked high in my hearth, giving off a comforting heat. But I could not stand to be still, could not bear another moment in my barrow, my prison as well as my home. I pulled out a skirt and blouse from the wardrobe, simple and serviceable. Usually my closet consisted of elaborate gowns, dresses that were more confectionary than necessary. Whenever I opened the wardrobe doors I found something new, and tonight, my wishes yielded something very like what I used to wear in the world above: plain, practical, and warm.