Der Erlk?nig throws his head back with a roar of mirth and contempt. “Did you think it would be so easy, changeling? To shed the life of the mortal you once were? I see the strings that still tie you to the world above. To her.”
His eyes dart my way, and I see the bonds of blood that have wrapped themselves in a stranglehold about my brother’s neck and chest, slowly draining him of joy. They are tied to the candle in my own chest.
“Why do you still wear his face, mischling?” Der Erlk?nig taunts. Halfling, half-blood, mongrel, I watch my brother bleed shame and agony. “Show us your real self!”
Josef pales. “This—this is my real self.”
“Is it?” The Lord of Mischief steps closer to my brother, and I see Josef flinch against that bitter breath. His winter’s gaze caresses my brother’s face, and those broken-jointed fingers run their tips lightly across Josef’s brow. “Those eyes are still human, mischling. Shall I pluck them out for you?”
“No!” My shout is a blade, my body a shield as I place myself between my brother and the Goblin King. “You shall not touch him.”
For the briefest of moments, Der Erlk?nig’s glacier eyes melt to reveal the man frozen behind them. His emotions take on the tang of death and mortality, not the clean, crisp taste of the fey and everlasting life.
“Would you save him?” he asks, and his voice is a kitten in my hand, soft and defenseless and vulnerable. “Would you choose him?”
Der Erlk?nig’s lips say one thing, but his words say another. Would you choose me? I hear them both, the man and the monster, and I cannot untangle one from the other.
“Why should I choose?” I ask instead. “Can I not save you both?”
The shadows writhe on Der Erlk?nig’s skin, rustling and hissing like a nest of snakes. As one, the gathering of goblins inhales a sharp breath. The air weighs heavy in my lungs, and I drown in tension and fear as the crawling darkness gathers itself around the Goblin King’s body. He screams in E-flat, iron nails of agony driving into my eardrums as he clutches his head.
Josef begins to keen in pain, a diminished second to the Goblin King’s scream, jarring and dissonant and grating against where I keep my love for him. My brother claws at his eyes as shadows begin to spill from them in blue-black tears, staining them onyx and obsidian.
Behind them both, the Wild Hunt begin to laugh, clapping their rusted blades against their shields in a pounding rhythm. Shrieks and cries rise up in a cacophony of torture and torment from the changelings and goblins assembled around me, limbs cracking, fingers breaking, bodies bent and reshaped into a giant mass of grasping hands to form a mouth, a nose, eyes, a face. The unholy host dissolves into mist, and the collective face breathes in deep, the wights and riders vanishing into fog. Its eyes open, glowing blue-white in the cavernous ballroom, and I know just what it is I am facing.
The old laws made flesh.
So you have returned to us, Goblin Queen. The voice is legion, a jumble of pitches and tones and notes. If I were not already mad, I might have lost my mind at the sight of its grotesqueness.
“I have come,” I say, “to claim what you have stolen.”
The eyebrows wrought of fingers and eyeballs lift, the edge of a lip made of elbows and toes curling into an ironic expression. And what is that?
I look to Josef. I look to the Goblin King.
“My heart.”
The Goblin King stirs at the words and lifts his head to meet my gaze. A kindling gaze, and it stokes the flames in my rib cage. It flickers and throbs, and I can almost hear it whisper a name.
Your heart? The old laws laugh, a hideous shriek and cackle of a myriad goblin voices. You have but one, mortal.
I wrap my hands around the candle in my chest. “It is big enough to warm them both. It is big enough to warm the world.”
Liar. The word flies from its lips and shatters against the stony walls of the cavern, scattering sharp jibes and jeers everywhere. Liar, liar, liar.
Such a pretty lie. But we know the ugly truth of you, Goblin Queen. We know of your overweening arrogance, your thoughtlessness, and your utter, selfish disregard for anything other than your own feelings. We know how you walked away from this pitiful vessel before us—a finger flicks in the Goblin King’s direction—to leave him to deterioration and decay. We also know how you took this sorry changeling—another finger toward Josef—and corrupted him with your love.
Josef whimpers, black ink running down his cheeks. The whites of his eyes are already lost to the Underground, and the blue of his human irises swim in darkness.
Look at that pathetic, mewling thing, the old laws sneer. This is what thou hath wrought, Goblin Queen.
Madness is an escape from boundaries, from inhibitions, from my own self-doubt, but I cannot escape my self-loathing. I did not know until that moment how reason had been my shield against the worst of my own excesses, the unbridled muchness of me. Shadows coil around my wrists and throat, my fingers breaking and twisting into gnarled branches.
The covenant is broken, the old laws croon. And it is your fault. Your fault, your fault, your fault. But you can make it right.
“How?” I cry.
The limbs and teeth and fingers and eyes and toes that make up the old laws’ face bubble and ripple, a skittering mass that breaks apart and re-forms into an enormous pair of hands, cupped together to offer me something in its palms. It is a smaller pair of hands, holding a dagger in its grip.
A life for a life, the old laws say. It is what we are owed.
I look to the Goblin King.
I look to Josef.
Choose, maiden. Choose your austere young man . . . or your brother.
The hands gripping the dagger stretch and grow, a branch, a sapling, a tree. The old laws offer me the blade, an ancient weapon, forged not from steel, but hewn from stone. It is simple, it is crude, it is cruel.
Choose, maiden, the old laws repeat. Pay the price, and the other goes free.
I take the dagger.
Yessssssssssssssss, they hiss. Make your choice.
I turn to my brother. His skin is clear, his bones wrought of glass, his blood of water. Where a candle ought to have burned in his chest, there is nothing, a black hole, a swamp. Marsh light flickers there, blue and ethereal, the ghost of flame.
I turn to the Goblin King. The shadows have left him utterly, leaving him horrifically scarred and disfigured, but his eyes are brilliant, bright, full. A candle lies in his rib cage, cold and dark, as though waiting for a breath to fan it to life.
Make your choice, the old laws demand.
The Goblin King looks at me, his lips curled up like a sleeping cat, cozy and sweet. He does not speak, but I hear him anyway.
Choose him. Choose your brother.
I look to Josef. I still cannot read the language of his features, but he shakes his head. “Let me go,” he tells me. “Give me up.”
The dagger in my hand is more than a weapon; it is a compass needle. It points me in the direction of my heart. I press the tip to my chest.
The mass of goblins shift, hesitancy in their voice. What are you doing?
“I am making my choice,” I whisper.
And drive the dagger deep into myself.
INSIDE OUT