But years of rising early to practice the violin were still buried deep within his muscles and bones. Josef shook off the remnants of sleep and roused himself, finding a clean set of clothes outside his door. He had not yet learned how to fill his hours without music, and the itch and the urge to play lingered in his fingers. He got dressed and picked up his violin.
Liesl was already gone by the time he left his room, and the housekeeper from the previous night was nowhere to be found. There was absolutely no one else in sight as he wandered through the wings and halls of Snovin, which suited Josef just fine. He had never been able to hear himself think in the presence of anyone else save his eldest sister and Fran?ois. It was why he found playing in front of an audience so intolerable.
As Josef passed from room to room, the manor’s state of decay became more and more noticeable. Shafts of light cut through the collapsed roofs and empty windows, dust motes dancing in the sunbeam like fairy lights. Winter still had its hold on this mountainous estate, but he didn’t mind the cold. It was calm. Clean, despite the dirt and twigs and creatures scurrying underfoot. It put him in mind of the forest just beyond the inn, a vast change from the filthy, smelly, and crowded homes in the city. Here he could play. Here he could find communion within himself again.
But despite the ease and familiarity he felt within these inside-out walls, he couldn’t find the right place to pull his violin from its case. He was searching for the sense of sacredness that had come with the Goblin Grove. He was seeking sanctuary.
“Help me,” he whispered to no one in particular. “Help me find peace.”
A clock chimed the hour.
To his right stood a grandfather clock, its face painted and gilded with the movement of the heavens. Its hands were not pointed to an hour, despite its sounding gong, and Josef could have sworn the spheres moving across their heavenly paths were still just a moment before. Behind him, there was a soft, grinding, clicking sound, the faint scream of rusted metal over metal. He turned to look.
A suit of armor was lifting its arm.
Tales of enchanted goblin-made armor rose up in his mind, imbued with a magic that made its wearer impervious to arrows and injuries and death. Such stories also came with accounts of fearsome fighting prowess, of the warrior defeating off hordes of the enemy with a skill in battle that was either preternatural or pretend. Not real. Not truly belonging to the warrior, but to the Underground.
Josef watched with detached fascination as the suit of armor lifted its arm, curled its fingers, and pointed down one of the corridors as if in answer to his question.
Help me. Help me find peace.
“That way?” he asked, mirroring the armor’s gesture.
Its empty, helmeted head moved up, then down, then up, then down in a herky-jerky motion, a grotesque parody of a nod.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
He followed the path of the armor’s direction, walking down a long, dark, high-ceilinged corridor toward a set of large double doors, opened ajar. Light spilled in through the crack, but shakily, unsteadily, as though shadows moved in the room beyond. He reached the doors, placed his hands on the ornately carved knockers, and pushed.
It was a ballroom.
The space was empty, although shadows still danced at the corners of his vision. A circular room paneled with many large, broken mirrors, the ballroom reflecting both light and movement like a prism. The cracked marble floors rippled with growing roots, dead ivy and desiccated vine crawling down the walls like fingers reclaiming the room. Josef and the wild were mirrored over and over, a thousand boys standing in a forest.
“Yes,” he breathed. If this place was not yet peace, then it was a balm to his soul: a room once dedicated to music and dance, now slowly becoming swallowed by the living, sleeping green. Twelve mirrored panels around him, like the twelve alder trees encircling the Goblin Grove; it felt both familiar and foreign. Back when he was a boy, before Master Antonius, before Vienna, before all the weight and expectations placed upon him, Josef had played his music in a place like this.
He set his case down and opened it, lifting his violin to his shoulder. He had no gloves and his fingers were cold, but Josef had long perfected the art of playing through numbness. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the scent of dirt and dust and deep woods filling his lungs. With the bow poised over his strings, he smiled. Then played.
And the world changed.
If there was anything left in his life that Josef loved, it was this. Music. The only thing of human invention he preferred to that of nature’s creation. Birdsong and cricket choruses had been the orchestra of his childhood, but his sister’s music had always been his star. His first soloist. When she sang him lullabies in the dark. When she wrote him little melodies to practice on the violin. It was as though he had learned to speak through the notes and lines and staff on the page. Language without words. Communion without communication.
The brambles and branches stirred at the sound of the violin. A sense of wakefulness came to a world deep in winter slumber, the intake of a breath before rousing. Beneath him and around him, the forest reached, stretched, grew, as though answering a call. The broken mirrored panels showed myriad boys amidst myriad trees, but Josef did not notice that all but one played the same song.
He transitioned from warmups and exercises to the largo from Vivaldi’s L’inverno, which had been his favorite piece since he was very young. Yet as his bow sang the notes, Josef felt distant. Removed. He could no longer remember why he had loved or cared so for this movement, only that the thrill of its melody was now gone. He thought of his father then, a man for whom one drink, then two, then three, then four or five or six had ceased to be enough. Had ceased to affect him.
The memory of his father marred Josef’s playing, and he hit a sour note. He stopped playing, and all the boys in the mirrors went still.
All save one.
Although Josef had lowered his instrument and his bow, still the sound of the violin carried on. Not an echo, but a reflection. The melody was familiar. Beloved. Cherished.
Der Erlk?nig.
Emotion blossomed in Josef’s chest—pain, fear, guilt, relief, excitement, tenderness. His sister’s music had a way of opening him up to feeling, of digging up the parts of himself he had left buried back home in the Goblin Grove. He turned and searched for Liesl—to apologize, to reach out for solace or comfort—but he was alone, with only a thousand versions of himself to keep him company. A thousand blue eyes and a thousand violins stared back at Josef as he gazed into the shattered mirrors, but at the corner of his eye, one of the other Josefs moved.