He turned and turned, but as it was with the way of reflections, the perspective shifted and changed with every movement of his head. It was only when he kept still, when the other Josefs stopped turning, that he could see one of them coming closer. He tried to catch his own eye, but his reflection remained on the edges of his vision, on the edges of his sanity.
Minutes. Hours. It wasn’t until Der Erlk?nig ended that he was face to face with his errant reflection. The other Josef wore a smile on his face that wasn’t mirrored on his own, and he held his violin on the opposite side. Or perhaps the correct side. He no longer knew what was left and right in this inside-out world.
“Who are you?” Josef asked, but his reflection’s mouth did not move in time with his.
I am you, the other Josef replied.
“And who am I?” he whispered.
The reflection only smiled.
THE BRAVE MAIDEN’S TALE, REPRISE
the brave maiden.
I was sitting with a descendant of the brave maiden. The first of us to die, and the only one of us survive the Goblin King’s embrace.
Until me.
“You . . . you . . .” I began, but my words trailed off into nothingness.
“Me, me,” the Countess repeated, although there was no hint of mockery in her voice. “Yes, Goblin Queen,” she said softly. “She walked away from the Underground, and lived. I am proof. And for hundreds of years, for several generations, her daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters were guardians and keepers of the balance between worlds, between the world above and the realms below.”
The crash and thunder of my beating heart hollowed out my ears, drowning all sound and sense. I watched the Countess’s lips move, but could not understand, could not comprehend a single word coming from her mouth. The notion was too big—too significant—to accept. The world narrowed to a small, singular idea.
I was not alone.
“Child? Child?” The scope and scale of my thoughts widened once more to encompass the chair I was sitting on, the room I was in, the person who was speaking to me. “My dear, are you all right? You look quite pale. Konrad, would you bring Mademoiselle Vogler something stronger than coffee to drink? A bit of sherry, perhaps?”
“I’m fine,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. It came from a place both far inside and outside of me, a voice so calm as to belong to another Liesl, another Elisabeth altogether. “I don’t need a drink.”
She watched me with those vivid, otherworldly green eyes. A jumble of half-started images and words and phrases tumbled through my mind—wife? child? Der Erlk?nig’s child? legacy family descendants found uprooted—the noise spinning into a blur of blankness. I blinked, and when I did not respond to her extraordinary claim in the manner she was apparently expecting, the Countess gave a little huff.
“Well,” she said, forcing a laugh, “this is not the reception to my revelation I had hoped for.”
“What was to be my response?” I asked, still in that stranger’s voice.
She gave an elegant shrug. “Surprise? Shock? Gratitude? Anger? Anything other than blankness, to be honest, my dear.”
The Count cleared his throat. “It is a lot to take in, darling.”
He was right. It was too much for my limited comprehension to encompass wholly, so I could only pick at the details as they became clear to me, one by one.
“Are you—are you a child of Der Erlk?nig?” Surely that wasn’t possible. A goblin girl told me long ago that no union of mortal and the Goblin King had ever been fruitful. And yet. My hand went to my lower belly. My bleeding had run their monthly courses as usual when I returned from the Underground. I felt a sharp stab of . . . envy? Relief? Emptiness? Exultation?
The Countess shook her head. “No, Elisabeth. I am not a child of Der Erlk?nig, unless you mean it in the sense that we—you, your brother, my husband, all those who believe, and I—are all his children. No,” she repeated, her voice growing soft and gentle. “I am a descendant of the Goblin Queen and her consort, a man who had once been the Lord of Mischief and the Ruler Underground. A daughter of a mortal woman . . . and a mortal man.” She looked to her husband, and he laid a hand on her shoulder.
“But they were both mortal . . .” I did not know how to phrase my question, or even what to ask. If what she said was true. If she indeed had powers spanning both the worlds above and below. If, if, if.
“How do I have my gift of opening and closing the barriers between worlds?” the Countess finished.
I nodded.
“Do you know the tale of Persephone?” she asked.
I blinked. “No,” I said slowly, feeling even more lost and unmoored than before. “I don’t believe so.”
“She was the daughter of Demeter,” the Count chimed in. Unlike his wife, his dark eyes were fixed on my face with a strange sort of compassion, even pity. “She was abducted by Hades and forced to become his bride.”
I shuddered, but not entirely with revulsion.
“Yes,” the Countess said. “Persephone ate the fruit of the underworld and was therefore condemned to spend half the year in Hades’s realm, the other half in the world above with her mother.”
A sudden pang of sympathy for Persephone swept through me. Sympathy and envy. Half the year with her family, the other half with her dark beloved. If only, if only.
“But what the story doesn’t say,” her husband added, “is that Persephone returned from the underworld changed. Different. A dark queen for a dark realm. The ancient Greeks dared not even speak her name, for to speak of her was to call her attention. So they called her Kore, which meant maiden.”
A sharp chill pierced through my numbness, sending shivers down my spine. Her name is lost to us, Twig had once said. The brave maiden. Nameless, and gone.
“Persephone returned changed,” the Countess said softly. “And so did the first Goblin Queen. When she reemerged into life from death, she came back different. She awoke with the ability to sense the rips in the world, the cracks, the in-between spaces, and to create them and to mend them. She was both of the Underground and the world above, and she passed that ability on to her children. To me.”
My heart skipped a beat. I remembered the last time I had seen my Goblin King standing in the Goblin Grove, the feel of our hands passing through each other’s like fingers through smoke, like holding on to a candle flame, insubstantial and painful all at once. What would I do for this ability? To pass between realms at will, to touch and hold and embrace my Goblin King in the flesh and not in memory?
“But,” the Countess said, “as you can see, I am the last of her bloodline. The last of us with this ability—this gift.”
Her voice hitched, a slight tremor that would have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for the tears glimmering in her eyes. I did not know if those tears were for a child she could not have, or a child she had had, then lost. Her husband’s hand on her shoulder tightened, the two of them taut and tense in their shared silent grief. Yet his features wore a troubled expression, as though this were a conversation he did not want to have.