“No!” I lunge forward and take my brother by the hand. “You can’t.”
“Why not, Elisabeth?” The Goblin King stands beside Josef, his form and figure as I had always known him. His mismatched eyes a faded green and gray, his face lean, his hair in silver-white-gold disarray about his head.
“Because . . . because . . .” But I cannot find the right words to say. This choice should be mine. It had always been mine.
“Stop being so selfish,” Josef teases. “Let us take on the burden for once.”
“I’m trying not to be,” I say in a small voice. “Selfish, that is.”
“Have you learned nothing from your time Underground?” The Goblin King stoops to pick my candle off the floor. “What was it I asked you oh so long ago?”
“When will you learn to be selfish,” I whisper. “When you will learn to do anything for yourself?”
“And when will you learn to let others do things for you?” The Goblin King hands my candle to my brother, who relights my flame with the marsh light in his own heart.
“Is this real?” I dare not voice the question louder than a murmur.
“What is real?” the Goblin King asks.
I shake my head. I do not know.
“Reality is what you make of it, Elisabeth,” he says. “The same as madness. Whether or not this is real matters not to me, but it matters to you. Therefore, which is it? What would you rather have it be?”
The feel of his skin against mine, the scent of his musk, the taste of his lips. The Goblin King has height and breadth and weight in my hands, and I watch the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes in and out. In and out. I have a sudden memory, or rather, a vision of the future, but one so closely lived as to be memory. I remember the two of us lying in bed, side by side, our bodies sticky with satisfaction and wrapped in the warm glow of easy comfort. I remember how the features of his face grow sharper with age, the skin thinning to reveal the fine lines and bones beneath. I remember the silver-white-gold of his hair turning white with frost, true white now, not the enchanted glitter of magic and the Underground. I remember how we grow old together.
“Real,” I say.
“Then name me.” His eyes are solemn. “Give me back to myself, Elisabeth.”
“But I do not know your name,” I tell him, my tongue tripping over my tears.
“You have always had it,” he replies. He presses his hand against my chest. “You have carried it ever and always, bringing remnants of me back into the world above.”
The monastery. I think of the names hewn into the stone walls of the catacombs, brothers long dead and gone. Mahieu, I remember. But that is not the Goblin King’s name. I realize then that I do know it, in bits, in pieces, in dreams. A wolf-boy, a feral child, a name carved into a windowsill.
“How . . .” I trail off.
He laughs softly. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“I really do wish He would be a little less mysterious and a lot more forthcoming,” I say irritably. The Goblin King chuckles.
“You gave me a name,” Josef says. My brother’s smile is tender and sweet, and I do not think I can bear the pain. “Now give him his.”
He takes my hand and places it in the Goblin King’s. My austere young man. My—
“Wolfgang,” I whisper.
Josef returns my candle to me, lit not with the fire from my altar, but from the marsh light in his own chest. His soul, my soul. I reach forward and light the candle in the Goblin King’s chest.
The shadows fall away.
“Go,” Josef says, and he points toward a window, where a girl with sunshine hair and summer-blue eyes stands with palms outstretched, waiting to take me by the hand.
“K?the,” I murmur.
Behind my sister stands Fran?ois. My brother and his beloved lock eyes. What is said in that long, quiet gaze is unknown to me, for although theirs is a language of love, it is not the language I speak. After a moment, Fran?ois nods. It is not a nod of resignation or defeat, but of acceptance. Of farewell. Josef nods his head in return.
“Go,” my brother repeats. “Go, and play your music for the world. Be the self you are meant to be, Liesl, just as I am the king I choose to be.”
“But how can I play without you?” I don’t bother to wipe away the tears streaming down my cheeks.
“You have him,” he says, tilting his head toward the Goblin King. Toward Wolfgang. “But you will always have me too. Your music is a bridge, Liesl,” he says. “Play it, and we shall always be together. Play it, and I shall always remember. You. Life. What it means to love. For your music was the first and only thing in this world that kept me human, the first and last thing I give back to you.”
I am crying so hard I can barely speak. “I love you, Sepperl.” Great, heaving sobs, and I cannot breathe, cannot gulp enough air to say this last goodbye. “I love you, mein Brüderchen. With my whole heart.”
Josef smiles, and the tips of his teeth gleam in the flickering candlelight. “And I love you, Liesl,” he says softly. “With the world entire.”
a baby cries in a cradle before stopping, the red fading from its overflushed cheeks.
It grows very still, pale, and wan.
Josef?
A little girl walks into the room. She is sallow-skinned and skinny, with dark hair and eyes that seem to take over her entire face. She leans over the cradle and touches her brother’s cheek.
The baby opens its eyes. They are a flat black. Goblin’s eyes. Changeling eyes.
Sepperl?
There is worry in her voice, and love. At the sound, the black in the baby’s eyes dwindles, and a pale blue appears in its place. It reaches out a tiny hand to the little girl, who holds it tightly in her own. The little girl begins to sing. A lullaby, a melody of her own making. It moves something within him, something new, something different, something marvelous.
A memory.
His memory. The first he could truly call his own, for it did not belong to the Underground, or to Liesl, or to anyone but himself.
Der Erlk?nig.
In the distance, music plays. It is the sound of his sister’s voice, reaching across the veil between worlds. And as he had done when he was a baby in a cradle, Josef reaches back.
Their souls touch, and it is a bridge. He had a name. He had a soul. He had grace.
Der Erlk?nig remembers what it is to love.
And brings the world back to life.
To Anna Katharina Magdalena Ingeborg Vogler
Care of the Faithful
Vienna
My darling K?the,
We have arrived safe and sound back in Bavaria with Mother and Constanze. Despite our fears, the inn has prospered without us, a steady flow of business filling our coffers instead of Papa’s debts. Our grandmother is as irritable and irascible as ever, although she did rouse herself from her quarters to greet Wolfgang. Like everyone else we’ve met on this journey back to the Goblin Grove, she is relentlessly charmed by him, although she would furiously deny it if asked.