After dinner, I returned to my quarters to find the door between Josef’s room and mine still shut. I did not know whether or not he had retired for the evening or if he hadn’t returned from his daytime wanderings. I undressed and climbed into my bed, though the hour was early. I was tired from our excursion to the monastery that afternoon, and I could use the rest.
Yet try as I might, I could not sleep. Silence pounded at my ears with the absence of sound. Back home, the forest chorus would have lulled me to sleep with its symphony of cacophony. In Vienna, the constant hum and drumming rhythm of human lives formed the bass line to my staccato days. But here, in Snovin, all was quiet. It was an empty sort of quiet. Once I would have sensed, would have known down to my marrow, whether or not Josef slept on the other side of a door, a window, a wall. The tether between us, woven of our love of music and magic, had frayed so badly that only the barest thread of blood tied us together.
And we weren’t even bound by that.
I turned over in bed, squeezing my eyes shut as though I could shut out my own guilt.
The other times that particular disloyal thought about Josef crossed my traitorous mind, my body was racked with self-loathing and disgust. But tonight I let myself examine it. Let myself think about what it meant—what I felt—that my brother was not my brother, but a changeling.
A changeling. Before I had gone Underground, I might have been delighted. Or proud. Or even envious for many of the same reasons Josef was jealous of me now. I understood better than anyone the pain of being unremarkable. Had I not privately railed to myself about how my brother’s talent set him apart from the rest of us? Music was a language we shared, and it hurt to know that not only was he better than me, he was anointed by Papa. To have discovered that my brother not only had a connection to the world of myth and magic to which we often escaped but an actual belonging to it might have devastated me.
Special. Chosen. Extraordinary. Josef had chosen his words well, for the accusations cut me to the quick. I curled up tighter into a ball, pulling my pillow over my face to blot out the last dregs of the setting sun.
But since I had walked away from the Underground, my thoughts about changelings had changed. I remembered the comely youths with whom my sister and I had danced at the goblin ball with their elegant faces and inscrutable eyes. The creature by the lake who had tricked me into crossing the barrier between worlds by playing on my homesickness and my longing for the simple pleasures of mortal life. Deceitful, tricksy, cruel. Inhuman.
Josef was inhuman. Josef was not mortal. Josef was a creature, a sprite, a thing. My entire being cringed at the notion of my brother as a thing. If my brother was not human, he was at the very least a person. He laughed, he cried, he sulked, he raged. He reasoned and felt the same as any other boy—youth—and it did not matter that his bone and blood was of otherkin, not mine.
And yet, it did. I thought of the baby who should have grown up to be my brother, the child of my parents’ mortal get. The one whose name and place and life my brother stole. That Josef had been a cheerful, easygoing child, ruddy-cheeked and sparkly-eyed. My Josef was a colicky, cranky baby, a difficult and disagreeable child that I nevertheless loved. Perhaps loved even more than the boy who shared my blood.
I should have been disgusted with myself. I loved a usurper, a thief, a monster. I turned the Goblin King’s ring over and over on my finger, feeling the silver slide smoothly across my skin.
You are the monster I claim, mein Herr.
Perhaps I loved the monstrous because I was a monster. Josef, the Goblin King, and me. We were grotesques in the world above, too different, too odd, too talented, too much. We were all too much.
Images flashed across the backs of my eyelids. Cloud shadows passing over sun-dappled red tiles. A monastery looking down its nose at the valley below. The names of monks carved into mountainsides, the echoes of memory ringing bells in my mind. Scarlet poppies springing from white snow with a whisper and a sigh. Faster and faster and faster, a long spiral down into the labyrinth of my subconscious yet I could not sleep, could not rest. I tossed and turned, unable to stop the whirlwind carousel thoughts flying out from the center: that I should tell Josef the truth.
I kicked at the bed linens tangled about my legs, clenching my fists and teeth to hold in the urge to scream. Notes and musical phrases and melodies crashed in my head, and I clapped my hands over my ears to drown out the noise. Rage and frustration were coiled in my limbs, a tantrum building in my body ready to burst forth with a roar and whimper. The truth about my brother’s changeling was a trap that could be tripped at any moment, and I would rather spring it myself than have it snap down upon our necks and break our relationship.
I should tell him.
I should tell K?the.
My eyes flew open. Clawing my way out from under the covers, I threw myself out of bed, unable to lie still any longer despite my fatigue. I paced back and forth before the windows of my room. For the first time in a long time, I wanted to play. I wanted to sit before my klavier and work out my feelings through my fingers, through the black and white keys, through major and minor.
Your music creates a bridge between worlds.
I thought of the evening we had performed Der Erlk?nig for the Count and Countess. The scent of ice and pine and deep woods filling the small, stuffy room. The whisper of my name across the veil. The weight of the Goblin King’s ring in the palm of my hand when I awoke from the dream. The sudden itch to play scratched at me, despite the Wild Hunt, despite the barrier between worlds, despite how utterly perverse and nonsensical it was to return to my art at the moment it was the least safe.
I shouldn’t.
And yet.
Why shouldn’t I?
The tantrum tempest raging within me fed upon my manic irritation, growing larger and stronger to encompass Josef, my sister, the Countess, the world. I was no longer the Goblin Queen, no longer mistress of a domain that would twist and bend itself to my will. I could not tear the curtains to shreds. I could not smash the dresser beside me. I could not tear the linen cupboard doors from their hinges. I could not shatter the windowpanes with my bare hands. I was in the world above now and I could not, I could not, I could not.
Dusk deepened outside, turning the sky indigo blue and the shadows a violet purple. I walked to the windows in my quarters and looked toward the hills behind the estate and Lorelei Lake. I saw the Countess walking toward the poppy field, her uneven gait distinctive even in the darkness. One by one, stars emerged in the sky, pinpricks of light that limned the world in silver. On a night like this, my brother and I would have imagined the goblins and fey out and about, wreaking havoc and mischief upon a sleeping world. Shapes moved about in the forest beyond the edges of the estate, my imagination running wild.
Until a stark silhouette emerged from the trees, carrying a violin.