“Lead on, Herr . . . ?”
The footman grinned, showing row upon row of crooked, yellow teeth. “You may call me Bramble.” He laughed at their confused expressions. “It was what the villagers called me when I was a babe, found abandoned and tangled in a blackberry bramble.”
“Ah.” K?the was embarrassed.
The edges of Bramble’s smile twisted, turning sinister, sad. “It’s all right, Fr?ulein. I am one of the lucky ones. They gave me a name. And a soul.”
Fran?ois knitted his brow. “A soul?”
“Aye, Herr Darkling,” Bramble said. “A changeling has no name and no one to call him home. But I do. I do.”
EVER OURS
Can our love persist otherwise than through sacrifices, than by not demanding everything?
— LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, the Immortal Beloved letters
SNOVIN HALL
the Procházka family estate was a shambles.
If I had thought their home in the environs of Vienna had been odd, it was nothing compared to Snovin Hall, the majestic, tumbledown manor that was the seat of their house. We had driven through the night on the evening of our flight from the city, stopping only to change horses. We slept on the road, ate on the road, and drank on the road, leaving no time to catch our bearings.
Or write a letter.
“Why such haste?” I had asked the Countess. “Surely men and women of your stature could afford more luxurious accommodations and modes of travel.”
“Oh, Otto detests traveling,” she replied. “The food disagrees with him, poor lamb.”
It was true the Count seemed to be a pampered, petted creature, but I couldn’t help but suspect that the Procházkas had other reasons for speed. No time for Josef or me to speak to anyone at a tavern or inn, no opportunity to pass along a message or a note to my sister and Fran?ois, no chance to . . . escape.
We spoke little on the journey, preferring to doze or watch the surroundings change. The countryside grew colder the farther from the city we drew. The smells and scents of human habitation, barnyard stock, churned mud and trampled hay and woodsmoke gave way to sharp pine, wet stone, deep loam, and dark spaces. Farmlands eventually began to grow more mountainous, more forested, more like . . . home.
Despite my distrust of the Procházkas, I felt a lightening in my chest the closer we drew to Snovin, as though I were letting go of a breath I’d been holding ever since I left Bavaria. Although my brother had kept mostly mum our entire carriage ride, I sensed that he, too, had been waiting to exhale. The quality of his silence shifted as we approached our destination, taking on a waiting, listening quality. Before he had been a fortress, a castle, a burg, but now there was a door in the wall. It could be opened, when the time was right.
Bits of snow drifted lazily like ash, settling on the road as we crested the hill and began our descent into the valley. As the path opened up before us, I gasped as the vista came into view.
Spindly turrets and towers of what appeared to be an ancient castle rose out of the earth like stony fingers reaching toward the sky. A forest encircled the house like a crown of thorns, a tangle of bare branches and the colorless gray-brown of sleeping green studded with gemstones of granite, while waiting clouds heavy with snow rested atop the hills in the distance. Twin waves of homesickness and homecoming overcame me at once, and a queer emotion floated in my chest, as though my heart had become unmoored from my ribs. There was something familiar about the sight before me. It wasn’t the forests or the hills or the dark unknown that was both similar to and dissimilar from the woods around Bavaria where I had grown up; it was the sense that I had seen this exact landscape before, although I could not remember where.
“Beautiful,” Josef murmured. I gave him a quick, sidelong glance; it was the first word he had said in days.
The Count beamed. “Isn’t it? The castle has been in my family for over a thousand years. Each generation of Procházkas has added to or subtracted from the original foundations, so hardly a single stone from the old building remains. Unusual and one of a kind, but not everyone appreciates its unique beauty as you do, young man.”
I did not think it was the castle my brother found beautiful, but the Count was right; the old castle was indeed one of a kind. I thought of the burg I had seen represented on the Procházka crest, but this castle seemed less like a fortress and more like a wattle-and-daub cottage made of borrowed bits from bigger, better buildings. The crenellations and parapets undulated along uneven slopes like the spine of a sleeping dragon, the manor towers and turrets were thrust out at tipsy angles, and gables jutted forth in unexpected places. Yet despite its oddities, there was a picturesque charm about it: a wild, untamed house for a wild, untamed landscape.
“What is that?” Josef pointed across the valley to a large building set into the hills before us, a crumbling ruin looking down upon us like a priest sneering down his nose at the populace.
“That is the old monastery,” said the Count. “It belonged to the order of St. Benedict before it was destroyed several hundred years ago. It’s been empty ever since.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“It burned down in a fire.”
As we drew closer, I could see scorch marks painted onto the stones, traces of oily black tears streaming from hollow-eyed windows. “What caused the fire?”
He shrugged. “No one knows. There are stories, of course. There are accounts there was a lightning storm of biblical proportions the night it burned down. Still others say that the ghost of a restless wolf-spirit started it. More likely than not”—he shrugged—“some poor hapless monk fell asleep at his desk while transcribing something and knocked his candle over.”
“Wolf-spirit?” Josef asked.
“There have been tales of spectral wolves and hounds in these parts for as long as I can remember,” the Count said. “The villagers still speak of D’ábel, a monstrous beast with two different-colored eyes like the Devil.”
His eyes fell to the ring on my finger, two mismatched gems winking from a wolf’s silver face. Without thinking, I quickly moved to cover it, not thinking how that gesture would betray its importance to my . . . hosts? Benefactors? Captors?
“An interesting piece of jewelry you have there, Fr?ulein,” he remarked. He and his wife exchanged glances. “May I see it?”
“I—I . . .” I did not know what to say, or how to decline without calling more attention to it. I myself didn’t want to think too hard about how it had been returned to me. “It—it does not belong to me,” I finished. “It is not mine to share.”