Wintersong

  “Then, one day, a brave maiden ventured into the Underground,” he went on. “To beg the king to return the world above to spring. She offered the king her life in exchange for the land. My life for my people, she said.”

  The burn of tears scalded my lashes. When the Goblin King first told me this tale, I had thought it beautiful. A noble tale of martyrs and sacrifice. But now that I understood the true cost of my life, I found it painful. I was not noble. I was selfish. I wanted to live.

  “Der Erlkönig sensed the fire in her,” he said. “And desired its warmth. He had been cold for so long that he no longer remembered light or heat or all that was good in the world. She was the sun and he was the earth waking from a thaw. So he accepted her hand in marriage—a hand given as a lifeline is to a drowning man. He clung to that hand with all his strength, and slowly, surely, they woke the world from winter.”

  The Goblin King paused, as though gathering his next words.

  “The role of the king underground is a burden, you know,” he said. “Each year, the turning of the seasons becomes harder and harder, for the further away from life and love the years take you, the less human you become. It takes love, you see, to bring the world back to life.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “You have to love the land, and the people who live in it. Love is the bridge that spans the world above and below, and keeps the wheel of life turning.”

  I remembered Thistle’s words to me. As long as you have a reason to love.

  “And then what happened?” My fingers traced the scar across the Goblin King’s heart, wondering at its history.

  “And then Der Erlkönig fell in love.”

  I waited for the rest of the story, for the Goblin King to continue. But the silence between us stretched and grew taut, until I could bear the tension no longer and broke it.

  “And?” I whispered.

  “It just occurred to me that I cannot in good conscience give this story a happy ending,” he said. “After all, do they not all end with And they all lived happily ever after?”

  A happy ending. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking, but the echo of Twig’s voice rang in my heart. Their love was a bridge, and so they crossed it. Could not the brave maiden have freed her Goblin King? Was her love not strong enough to span both worlds? Mein Herr was not the first; surely he would not be the last.

  “Did … did not the brave maiden love Der Erlkönig?” I asked.

  The Goblin King stiffened. “I don’t know.”

  I bit my lip and turned my face away, unable to meet his gaze. “I think she did. She must have done. Otherwise, how else … how else could you…”

  I could not finish.

  “Would you like another story, Elisabeth?” The Goblin King’s voice was tight.

  I swallowed. “Yes.”

  “It is,” he said after a moment, “a story that belongs to me. But I shall leave it up to you to decide whether or not the end is happy.”

  I nodded.

  “Once upon a time, there was a young man.”

  I turned to give him a sharp glance. The Goblin King merely smiled, but whether sad or sweet, I could not tell.

  “An austere young man?”

  He laughed softly. “Is that what you call … what you call him?”

  My cheeks reddened and I was too embarrassed to answer.

  “An austere young man,” the Goblin King mused. “I suppose so. Austere, pompous, foolish. Yes, foolish,” he said decidedly. “Once upon a time, there was a foolish young man, who walked the world above in search of wisdom to make him less foolish. One day, he chanced upon a king in the wood, a king underground, who claimed to hold all the secrets of life, love, and Heaven.”

  I held my breath. A story that belongs to me. A story of how he had come to be Der Erlkönig.

  “The king offered his knowledge to the foolish young man—for a price. The price, said the king underground, is my crown, for which you must give me your soul and your name. The young man, being foolish, agreed to the underground king’s price.”

  It was as though all the air had been pulled from my lungs. The austere young man had been tricked—tricked into holding his throne. And that was the truth of the gallery of Goblin Kings. There has always been Der Erlkönig. There always will be Der Erlkönig. I could not breathe for the pity that wrapped its hand about my throat.

  “The foolish young man thought it wasn’t much of a sacrifice—after all, a changeling had no soul, and he had never had a name that was truly his own.” The Goblin King’s laugh was as bitter as anodyne. “But as the years wore on, as the weight of immortality grew heavier and heavier, he realized what a fool he truly had been, to have taken the king underground at his word. For no power in the world above or below was worth the torment he felt.”

  “Oh, mein Herr.” I lifted my hand to push the hair away from his face, but the Goblin King was not finished with his tale.

  “Then, one day, he came across a maiden in the wood.”

  “A brave maiden?” I ventured.

  “Brave,” he agreed. “And beautiful.”

  I scoffed. “This is a fairy tale indeed.”

  “Shush.” He touched a finger to my lips. “The maiden was both brave and beautiful, beautiful in ways that she did not see. Could not see, for all her beauty was locked away inside, magic and music, waiting to be set free.”

  I was brave and beautiful. It was both a pretty lie and an ugly truth.

  “They became friends, the beautiful maiden and the foolish young man. They became friends, and the foolish young man began to remember all that was good and wonderful about the world. About humans. Music, faith, folly, passion. But,” the Goblin King said, “as they grew older, the beautiful maiden forgot the foolish young man. She forgot him, and the foolish young man forgot why he had wanted to be human.”

  I cringed.

  “So he set out a trap, caught the beautiful maiden, and kept her in a cage. She had a song and he wanted it, so the foolish young man made her sing it again and again until he let her out. But the beautiful maiden dutifully returned to her cage night after night, and for the first time in eternity, the foolish young man thought he could be happy.”

  “And was he?” I asked in a hoarse voice.

  “Yes,” he said, barely audible. “Oh, yes. He had never been happier.”

  My throat closed up.

  “But, happy as the foolish young man might have been, the beautiful maiden was not. The cage was killing her, killing her spirit. And gradually, little by little, all that the foolish young man cherished about the beautiful maiden began to disappear. There was nothing he could do but watch her fade into a ghost before his very eyes, nothing unless he ripped out his own heart. Keep her, make himself happy, and watch her die? Or set her free, break his heart, and watch her live?”

  He fell silent.

  “So how does the story end?”

  He met my gaze, and for the briefest moment, I thought those remarkable eyes brightened and deepened in color, just like the portrait of the austere young man, just like the eyes he must have had when he was human.

  Then I blinked and they were as they ever had been: pale, faded, and icy.

  “You are the one who wanted a happy ending, my dear. So you tell me, how does the story end?”

  Tears slipped from my face, and he wiped them away with his thumbs.

  “The foolish young man lets the beautiful maiden go.”

  “Yes.” His voice was clotted thick with unshed emotion. “He lets her go.”

  I burst into sobs then, and the Goblin King gathered me close, rocking me in his arms as I cried. I cried for the breaking of the foolish young man’s heart. I cried for the happiness we might have had. I cried for the selfishness I could not overcome. I cried for him, for us, but most of all, for myself. I was going home.

  “You must leave, Elisabeth,” he said softly.

  I nodded my head, unable to speak.

  “Choose to live, Elisabe
th. There’s a fire within you; keep it alight. Feed that flame with music and seasons and chocolate torte and strawberries and your grandmother’s Gugelhopf. Let it grow with your love for your family. Let it be a beacon to set your heart by, so that you may remain true to yourself.” He stroked my cheek. “Do this, so that I may remember you like this: fierce and full of life.”

  I nodded again.

  “Are you ready?”

  No. “Tomorrow,” I said.

  He smiled, then kissed me. His lips were gentle, and in them I tasted a farewell.

  I kissed him back. Time did not stop for anyone, least of all me, but in that moment of our kiss, I found a little pocket of eternity.

  THE MYSTERY SONATAS

  If I did not sleep, tomorrow would never come.

  I left the Goblin King slumbering in my bed and ran away. Not to the retiring room, where our music waited upon the stand, but to the chapel. It was his sanctuary, his place of refuge, but on this last night before my freedom, I wanted a word with God.

  Neither Thistle nor Twig were on hand to guide me, but by now, I had learned that the labyrinth of the Underground unraveled for the Goblin Queen, and the path from my bedroom to God’s house was straight and narrow.

  I wondered who had built the chapel. High above me, illuminated stained glass windows depicted various scenes, not from the life of Christ or the acts of the Apostles, but of Der Erlkönig and his brides. On the right, a series of panels showed a golden-haired woman clothed in white and a dark horned figure. The seasons progressed along with the panels as the maiden in white grew pale and thin. The very last window showed the maiden dying in the horned figure’s arms as another woman in blue stood behind them.

  The windows lining the left-hand side showed a young man in red, riding a white horse through a forest as little hobgoblins and grotesques cavorted at its feet. As the windows went on, the young man encountered a mysterious horned figure in the woods, a nimbus of darkness surrounding him instead of a halo of light. As the young man knelt at the figure’s feet, the dark gloriole enveloped them both, and in the following panel, a shadowy gray man rode away on a white horse, leaving the young man in red with a crown of antlers upon his head.

  The answers had always been here. But I had never thought to look for them in the house of God.

  I knelt before the altar beneath the crucifix. I was an indifferent believer at best, a possible heathen at worst, having believed in God the way a child believes without question that tomorrow will come. Neither prayer nor catechism were particularly valued in my house, but I bowed my head before the sanctuary.

  I did not know how to ask for courage or resolution. I did not know how to ask to stay the march of time, just for a little while. I was not ready to face the world above. Not yet.

  There were no mirrors to the outside world in the chapel, but I imagined the Goblin Grove in the predawn lined with dark, with the faintest blush of blue lightening the blackness. The hour when the kobolds and Hödekin come out to play, Constanze used to say. I imagined the colors of the sky lightening and changing, a change so slight and gradual it might not be happening at all. In the world above, that would be my life, each second of each day passing with so little fanfare that the thought of dying was nothing more than the thought of dawn just beneath the horizon.

  I had never given much thought to growing old, and the woman I would be when I was my grandmother’s age. Would I be like my grandmother, wizened and crabbed? Or someone more like Mother, whose fine lines and faded hair were graceful touches of wisdom rather than age? I touched my fingers to my cheek, still smooth, still young. As I aged, those cheeks would sink, the skin losing its firmness, its shape.

  Käthe would have been horrified at the thought, but the idea of growing old gave me comfort. To grow old was to have lived a full life. Not all of us were so privileged as to have a full life. And now that privilege would once again be mine.

  “Elisabeth.”

  The Goblin King stood at the foot of the aisle, violin in hand.

  “I didn’t think you were especially devout, my dear,” he said, an amused expression on his face.

  “I’m not.” I got to my feet, dusting the dirt from my knees. “But I came seeking fortitude.”

  His eyes were soft. “Fortitude for what?”

  “To face tomorrow.”

  The Goblin King smiled, full of compassion and sympathy, striding up the aisle to stand beside me. “And did He answer?”

  “No.”

  He shook his head. “It may be He already gave you the answer, but you have not the understanding to see it,” he said softly. He tapped a finger against my heart. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “Well, I would appreciate it if the Lord were a little less mysterious and a little more straightforward.”

  He chuckled. “So say we all.”

  I rolled my eyes before my gaze fell to the instrument in his hands. “What’s that for?”

  In answer, he began tuning the violin. Plink, plink, plink, plink. Instead of tuning the strings to their standard intervals, the Goblin King tuned them to different pitches. He unstrung the middle D and A strings and crossed them before stringing them back to their pegs, leaving him with a scordatura I had never heard used before. Plink, plink, plink, plink. G, then another G, D, and another D. His ear was good. The Goblin King ran his bow over each string with a smooth, practiced motion as he fine-tuned their pitches, and I watched how easily his hands and fingers moved across the violin, familiar like old friends who had grown up together.

  When he had finished, he turned to me. “Worship,” he said simply. “I came here to worship Him in the only way I can. With the only thing remaining to me that is still pure, still … mine.”

  His. Despite what the Goblin King said, the austere young man still lived within him. No magic, no spell, no trick had given my Goblin King his extraordinary way with the violin. The power did not belong to Der Erlkönig; this gift was his, and his alone.

  “I can leave,” I offered. “If you would like to worship in private.” I thought of the night I had trespassed upon him here, in this very chapel, and felt shame settle over me like a cloak.

  He held my gaze for a long moment. “No, stay,” he said at last. “Stay, and be with me.”

  I had demanded every last bit of him last night. His body, his lust, his name, his trust. But there were corners of his soul I dared not ask to reveal; even as I understood the need to hold some things sacred to yourself alone. His piety was one of them. The enormity of what he was granting me whisked my shame from me, replacing it with a sense of awe.

  There were no pews in this chapel; there had only ever been one member of the faithful. So I sat down on the steps of the sanctuary, folded my hands, and let myself be with him, to accept this gift.

  The Goblin King lifted his bow to the violin and closed his eyes. I watched him take a deep breath and begin the count in his head.

  The piece began with a declaration, a proclamation of joy. The phrase repeated itself a few times before it was joined by a chorus of voices. The Goblin King skillfully conveyed them all through various shades of emotion and nuance, one after another, each in turn. All proclaiming Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah! beneath his fingers. Then a pause, a breath, before he resumed; a stately sonata, reiterating the glad tidings of the first proclamation.

  I had known he played beautifully. Like Josef, the Goblin King played not just with skill and precision, but with love. Yet they were as different from each other as night and day. My brother played with purity, but the Goblin King played with devotion. Josef’s talent with the violin had always been that of ruthless clarity. Nothing of the earth could touch my brother’s playing; he trod upon the ether and the air, the notes transcendent and oh so beautiful, so beautiful.

  But the Goblin King’s playing was weighty; the notes held depth and gravitas. Emotions my brother had not yet learned: grief, tragedy, loss. The Goblin King’s virtuosity was earned.

/>   The piece came to a close, the last note fading into the silence between us. I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.

  “It’s beautiful,” I whispered, not wanting to break the reverent hush in the room. “Did you write it?”

  He opened his eyes slowly, emerging from a trance. “Hmmm?”

  “Did you write it? It’s exquisite.”

  He smiled. “No. I did not write it. But you could say it wrote me, in a manner of speaking.”

  “What’s the piece called?”

  A pause. “The Resurrection. One of the Mystery Sonatas.”

  “Where did you learn it?”

  Another pause. “At the abbey where I was raised.”

  Such tiny crumbs from his past. I swallowed each morsel like it was my last meal. I hungered for him, for the austere young man, for every bit of him I could not have.

  “Which abbey?”

  His only response was another smile, with just the tiniest hint of teeth. The Lord and the Goblin King worked in mysterious ways, and I rather wished they didn’t.

  “Who wrote the piece?” I pressed.

  “Are we in another round of Truth or Forfeit?” he teased.

  “Only if you wish it.”

  He paused before giving his answer. “I do not know who originally composed it.” His eyes were distant, his fingers absentmindedly thumbing the strings on the violin. “I stole bits and pieces of song from the cloisters whenever I could, listening at corners and fingering the notes with an imaginary violin. I adapted the sonata as best as I could from memory.”

  I tried to place the sonata in time from my slipshod, piecemeal history lessons. It lacked the melodic musicality to which we’d grown accustomed in the world above, and sounded a bit old-fashioned. But it lacked the structure of a sonata as I knew it, a little wild, a little fluid. We had both skulked in the shadows, the Goblin King and I, eavesdropping on things to which we had no right.

  “You could expand upon the themes,” I suggested. “The scordatura is a little unusual, but it might be interesting to take the melody and play it again in a minor key.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “You are the genius, Elisabeth, the one who creates. Me? I am a mere interpreter.”