“It is not Der Erlk?nig you should fear,” Twig whispers, “but the reckoning he is owed.”
I open my arms wide, my robes of spider-silk and black lace billowing in an unseen wind. I am a top out of control, toppling and wobbling back and forth, back and forth, and the exhilaration and uncertainty excites me, for I do not know where I will go or what I will say.
“I am the Goblin Queen,” I giggle. “I can pay whatever is asked of me.” The words bubble from my lips and pop with little bursts of arrogance before me. I laugh again, feeling the tickle on my tongue.
“Even if it is the changeling boy?” Thistle asks.
My arms fall to my sides, and I fall over, the center thrown from me. Josef. How bothersome that I could not shed my love for him as easily as I gave up my reason. My heart cracks, and the pieces belonging to my brother glow and pulse through the cage of bones. I am a skeleton draped in cobwebs with a candle flame at its core. My sanity was my prison and my armor and without it, the flame flickers this way and that, buffeted by forces beyond my control. I lift my hands to cover my naked heart, but it is not enough to shield it.
“My brother has nothing to do with this,” I say.
“Oh but he has everything to do with this,” Thistle returns. “After all, is he not the reason you came back?”
“Yes, but I won’t give him back!” Petulance forces my lips into a pout. “He’s mine!”
Twig and Thistle’s eyes slide back and forth, from my face to each other. Selfish, selfish, selfish, they seem to say. I want to snatch those beetling eyes and wear them like rings about my fingers, to shut up their unvoiced censure.
“Stop looking at me,” I snap. “Stop judging me.”
My goblin girls look at each other again. “As you wish, Your Highness,” they say. “As you wish.”
*
I demanded a ball, but the gathering of goblins and changelings in the enormous, glittering cavern do not look as though they are enjoying themselves. There is no music, no dancing, no feasting, no flirting. I cast my gaze thither and hither, both disturbed and delighted by the transparency of feelings upon their features. When last I visited the Underground, it was as though I visited a foreign land, the language just familiar enough to be intelligible. But now the world is not just intelligible, it is comprehensible. Comprehended. Commendable.
“I am one of you!” I clap my hands with delight, pinching the cheek of a leather-faced imp wearing a mask of trepidation. “I see you! I hear you! I understand you!”
I survey the room from the top of the carved stone stairs at the entrance to the cavern. Where once I would have seen a sea of identical faces staring back at me, I now saw individuals as clear and distinct as leaves on a tree. How have I not noticed pattern and repetition and shape of them? The veins that define them, the unique marks and branches that form them?
As I descend the steps, the crowd parts before me like the Red Sea before Moses, opening up a path straight from my feet to the figure at the other end of the cavern, sitting on a throne of antlers upon a marble dais. He lounges upon that enormous chair, inky swirls of black staining his skin, a pair of ram’s horns jutting from his brow. His eyes are pale, the blue-white of blizzards and icy death.
Der Erlk?nig.
A host of ghostly warriors flank him on either side of the throne, wights and geists and spectral horsemen, dressed in rotting scraps of flesh and fabric, holding spears and shields rusted with age and disuse. The Wild Hunt.
“Mein Herr!” The smile starts at my toes and wriggles up my body, wrapping about my lower belly, my chest, my throat, my face. The cavern rings with my voice, and all those assembled cringe from the force of it.
All save one.
Sitting at Der Erlk?nig’s feet is a fair-haired youth, long-limbed and lanky, with sharp cheekbones and an even sharper chin. Of all the changelings around me, his are the only eyes that look human. Clear as water and blue, blue, blue.
Josef.
But I don’t recognize my brother. Where the expressions of the other goblins and fey creatures of the Underground are books I can read, Josef’s is like trying to find words in a painting. The flame in my chest stutters and sputters with my uncertainty.
“Welcome home, my queen.” Der Erlk?nig’s thin lips unfurl into a sneer, teeth glinting in the changeable, mercurial light of the Underground. “Have you missed us?” The sneer sharpens, his eyes turning glacial. “Have you missed me?”
“Yes,” I say. “I have longed for you every minute, every hour, of my waking days.”
Color flares briefly in those eyes, a lightning flash of depth and dimension. “And your sleepless nights?”
Lust ripples through my veins, my blood a murmuring brook of want. The monster before me is beautiful in his ugliness, and I imagine those corrupted hands curled around me, our skin alternating black and white like the keys of my klavier. The candle within me glows brighter.
“My nights are spent running from my desire for you. For devastation. For oblivion.”
Der Erlk?nig gets to his feet. “Yes.” He sighs, the sound drawn out in a sibilant whisper that slithers about my loins. “Yes.”
Yes, please, yes. I walk forward as Der Erlk?nig descends from the dais. I bare my throat to him in submission, waiting for the wolf’s bite that will spill my life’s blood onto the floor. He wraps those multijointed hands about my arms and pulls me close, pressing his lips against where my pulse flutters beneath the skin, breathing deep the scent of my mortality.
His fingertips are licks of flame that leave chilblains in their wake, my flesh turning dead-white and deadweight beneath his touch. Claws find my every crevice, as though he can dig into me and tear me apart. I laugh with a scream.
“No!” Josef leaps upon Der Erlk?nig’s back, breaking his grip on me. “Leave her alone! You’re hurting her!”
As the Lord of Mischief steps away, I feel something hot running down my chin. I touch my face and my fingertips come away wet and red.
A nosebleed.
The world slips and slides around me, and when I lift my hands, I can see straight through my skin down to the muscles and blood and bone of my flesh. Der Erlk?nig is stripping away who I am, layer by layer. I laugh again, and my laughter emerges from Der Erlk?nig in a chuckle as he turns to my brother.
“Does she not deserve to be hurt? Does she not deserve to be destroyed? Have not those very thoughts crossed your own head, O nameless one?”
Josef looks to me, but I still cannot understand the words of his eyes.
“What are you doing here?” Der Erlk?nig asks him. “Why have you come?”
“I . . . I’ve come home,” Josef says, the pitch of his voice softer than the sound of my thoughts.