I paused.
“Why does the world seem not enough and too much? It is because you are of both, and neither, Elisabeth. Your mind and body are here, and your soul is elsewhere. I’ve felt it, child. I’ve heard it. The reason your music is a bridge between the Underground and the world above is because of your initial sacrifice. You sacrificed your music. You sacrificed your genius, your talent, and your creativity to the old laws when you crossed the threshold the first time. Any time you play, you reach across that barrier. It makes you whole and broken all at once.”
Her words sailed right into the stormy heart of me, straight down the abyss swirling at the center of the maelstrom. “How—how do you know this?” I asked in a hoarse voice.
The Countess laughed, a bright, merry sound, and it was the ugliest thing I had ever heard. “I know because your face is as transparent as glass. Because you don’t just wear your feelings on your sleeve; your emotions wear you.” Her eyes darkened, the green turning brittle and sharp. “I know because my reckless, feckless ancestor bartered away her children’s freedom, all for the sake of self-preservation. We are the forsaken, Elisabeth. The punishment for our selfishness and our greed is to perpetuate the cycle.”
I pressed my hands to my mouth to muffle my sobs. Special Liesl. Chosen Liesl. You have always wanted to be extraordinary, and now you are.
“No,” I said through clenched teeth. “No. I cannot—will not—believe that is my fate. I will not hurt others with my thoughtless actions, even if it means giving myself up to the old laws.”
The Countess lifted her brows. “Even if you were as selfless as all that, Elisabeth, think you that your return to the Underground will undo all the damage you’ve caused? Oh, child. We can only move forward, not change the past.”
I thought of Josef. I thought of the Goblin King. “I have to try,” I said quietly.
“And just how were you planning on accomplishing that, my dear?” the Countess asked. She held her husband’s compass before her, the trinket glinting in the light of the setting sun. “Return to Lake Snovin to . . . what? Throw yourself in? And then?”
And then what indeed. “Save my brother,” I said. Then I thought of mismatched gray and green eyes consumed by white so pale as to be nearly blue.
The Countess laughed. “And then what? Save your Goblin King?”
It was the fact that she had voiced aloud the hopes I had not even dared to consider that hurt most, even more than the snide dismissal in her tone.
“I have to try,” I said again.
“Oh, child,” the Countess sneered. “If you think you are the one to break the cycle of sacrifice and betrayal, then your arrogance knows no bounds.”
Bile began to rise at the back of my throat, acrid and bitter. “Did not the first Goblin Queen walk away?” I asked. “Did she not go back and wrest her Goblin King away from the clutches of the old laws?”
“And what do you think she left as payment?” the Countess returned.
I fell silent.
“A life for a life, Elisabeth. Death for harvest. It was she who tricked another youth into staying behind, into becoming the next Goblin King. Who then, in turn, went out into the world in search of a bride to remind him of the mortal life that was ripped from him. And in turn, that man thrust the throne upon yet another, and another, and another. It doesn’t end, mademoiselle. Not for us. Not for Der Erlk?nig’s own.”
The maelstrom was closing in, the waters of madness threatening to submerge me in their depths. I could not—would not—succumb. I would not drown in despair. If there was anything I had to keep me going, it was that I believed in love—the Goblin King’s for me, my own for my brother. And my sister. And the world above. I had to try, or fail my own sense of self.
“Poor fool,” the Countess said softly, seeing the expression on my face. “Poor, poor fool.”
I snatched the compass from her fingers. “If you will not help me,” I said. “Then do not stand in my way.”
She stared at me for a long moment, saying nothing, though her vivid green eyes held all the words in the world. Then she nodded, and stepped aside.
“Viel Glück, Elisabeth,” she said as I shoved past. “Godspeed.”
*
Once outside, I followed the path directly away from the needle onto a hidden trail, up the slopes, and to the mysterious, mirrored lake that reflected another sky. A path of impossible poppies sprang up at my feet, swaying and whispering in an unseen wind.
The souls of the sacrificed. All the hairs along the back of my neck and my arms rose up as though greeting this invisible breeze, as the whispers and murmurs resolved into words.
Hurry, hurry, the poppies urged. It is not too late.
It was not too late. I took courage, and ran.
The clouds overhead were heavy and gray, laden with early spring snow. Fat, wet snowflakes fell in heavy drops, half rain, half ice. Behind me, I could hear the faint drumming of hooves. Or perhaps it was the thudding of my anxious heart in my breast, beating an erratic tattoo of fear and excitement. I raced up the hill, heedless of my tread and where my footfalls lay.
The path quickly turned treacherous, the light dusting of snow turning the dirt underfoot slippery with mud. The trail was narrow, just barely wide enough for a human, even one as small as me. One misstep and I would plunge to my doom. The thought tumbled through my brain, and I could not resist looking over the ledge. It was a long, sheer drop to the valley floor several hundred feet below me, and I could not help but edge closer, lean farther out. There was ever a part of me that loved to face danger, to stare it in the eye and dare it to do its worst. I wanted the knife’s edge of mortality pressed against my throat, to feel my pulse murmuring beneath the blade. I never felt more alive than when I was close to death.
Then the shelf on which I was standing crumbled.
For one piercing moment of clarity, I thought that this was perhaps the truest expression of my fate. That for all I tried to do good by those I loved and for the world, in the end it would be my own arrogance, recklessness, and mania that would trip me up. That would keep me down. That would ruin everything I touched despite my best intentions.