Her green gaze grazed my skin, stinging like the rays of the sun. “No. I know you are,” she said in a low, hard voice. “Goblin Queen.”
The words thudded in the thick air, heavy and portentous and accusatory. Silence came down like a curtain between us, muffling all thought, all feeling, all sensation. Josef hissed in surprise, drawing away from me as though he had been burned. Betrayed. The Count’s eyes darted between his wife and me, shrinking like a nervous rabbit caught between a hawk and a wolf.
“No,” I whispered. “How did you . . . I’m not . . .”
“Yes,” she hissed. Those green eyes were lit with fervor, crackling like St. Elmo’s fire. “Did you think you could walk away without facing the consequences?”
I shook my head. “He let me go.” My voice was small, remembering the last time I had seen the Goblin King, whole and entire, standing in the Goblin Grove with his hand upraised in farewell. “He let me go.”
The Countess scoffed. “And you believed him?”
I thought of the ring in my hand, but I dared not turn it over to study it, to verify that I had pulled a promise from a dream. “Yes,” I whispered.
“He is not the Lord of Mischief for nothing,” she said.
I thought of mismatched eyes fading to white, the image of a young man turning into a monster, his beautiful violinist’s hands contorting into claws, horns growing from the crown of his head. “He is so much more than that.”
“Liesl,” Josef said. “What is going on? What is happening? Goblin Queen? Unholy host? What does this all mean?”
I said nothing. I did not—could not—face my brother at the moment. I had once tried to tell him of my fantastic past, of my time beneath the earth as Der Erlk?nig’s bride. I had bared my soul in writing, in words if not in notes, but Josef never received them. That letter had never reached him, along with the countless others I had sent, stolen by the woman before me. And now the rapport between my brother and me was broken. Muffled. Stifled. Silenced.
“It means nothing good, lad,” the Count said gently. “It means that we need to get you and your sister somewhere safe as soon as possible, away from the unholy host.”
Josef narrowed his eyes. “The unholy host?”
“They have many names.” The Count was the very picture of a bumbling, absentminded man, the kind people were apt to dismiss due to his amiability. Yet his black-button eyes were sharp, and a canny intelligence gleamed there, nearly lost to the smiling chubby cheeks. “Some know them as the Wild Hunt. Back home in Bohemia, we call it divoky hon. Your dark-skinned friend would know them as le Mesnée d’Hellequin, I should think.”
“Hellequin?” I thought of the figures of the commedia dell’arte, those black-and-white-masked players onstage as Columbine, as Pierrot, as Harlequin. I’d seen those costumes at the Procházkas’ ball. “Like the trickster?”
“Hellequin, Harlequin, the Italian Arlecchino, Dante’s devil Alichino, whom the Anglo-Saxons called herla cyning,” he said. “They are one and the same. You know him best, Fr?ulein, as Der Erlk?nig.”
Josef sucked in a sharp breath. “The Goblin King.”
“Yes,” he said solemnly. “The ruler Underground.”
The ring in my palm. A promise made, a marriage troth broken. I curled my fingers even tighter, feeling the impression of the wolf’s-head dig into my hand like a brand.
“Then it’s true,” Josef whispered. He trembled in the seat next to me, but not with fear. With excitement. Eagerness. “What the legends have said. What our grandmother always told us. Der Erlk?nig calls to us, beckons us to his side. It’s all true?”
The longing in my brother’s voice tugged at me, tangling the threads of guilt and love that were wound around my heart. We always come back in the end. Twin spots of red stained his cheeks, and his blue eyes shone like gems in the dark.
“Yes, young man.” The Countess looked grave. “It is all true. Which is why we have brought you here, so we can watch over you.”
The letter. The fifty florins. The apartments, the appointments, the auditions, the audiences. All arranged by the Countess. Every thing, down to the even, elegant handwriting that gave no clue as to the intentions of its author, was calculated for this. To bring me to Vienna. To bring me before her.
To the composer of Der Erlk?nig. It was not my music the Countess had been after. I did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
“But why?” I asked her. “I am not the Goblin Queen, not anymore. I gave up that power. That responsibility.”
The Countess’s eyes glittered. “The old laws have not given you up, Elisabeth. Think you can remove the taint of the uncanny so easily? You have a gift, child. It makes you vulnerable.”
I frowned. “What gift?”
It was a long moment before she replied. “When I first heard your brother play that queer little bagatelle you both performed tonight, I sensed it,” she said softly.
“Sensed what?”
She turned her head away. “The thinning of the barrier between worlds.”
All the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
“At first, I thought it was your brother who had the gift,” she said, giving Josef a sidelong glance. “He certainly has a marvelous talent for music, but no, it was not his playing that parted the veil between us and the Underground. It was the notes.” She laughed, without humor, without mirth. “Those of us who have been touched by Der Erlk?nig can reach across worlds, in sight or sound or sense. We can hear things, see things, feel things that no other mortals can witness. My gift is sensation, but yours, Elisabeth, is sound.”
The air around us grew heavy, stale, thick, as though we were trapped in a burrow. A barrow. A grave.
“Touched by Der Erlk?nig,” I breathed. “What do you mean? Have you . . . have you met . . . him?”
The Count and Countess exchanged glances. “Not all of us,” he said, shaking his head. “Some of us merely wish to be graced with the gifts of the Underground.”
“You keep saying gifts,” I said. “What gifts?”
“Why, a connection with the unseen currents of the world,” he said, opening his hands and spreading them wide, palms turned up as in supplication. “They say the greatest artists, musicians, philosophers, inventors, and madmen were elf-touched.”
Elf-touched. Magda. Constanze. Me. Those broken, beautiful members of our family with one foot in the Underground and one in the world above. Straddling the here and there had turned them inside out.
“Madness is not a gift,” I said angrily.
“Nor is it a curse,” the Count returned gently. “Madness simply is.”
The Countess shook her head, but bestowed a small, tender smile upon her husband when she thought the rest of us didn’t see. I looked to my brother, but Josef kept his gaze averted. Instead he was staring at the Procházkas, his face a picture of hunger, want and desire honing the features of his face into an almost predatory sharpness.