Slowly, he raises his hand to undo the buttons of his shirt. He is informally dressed—no waistcoat, no silken breeches, just a simple shirt and trousers. Yet it takes ages for the Goblin King to become revealed to me. I hold my breath; I had not realized how much I’d longed to be able to see him—all of him—unobstructed and uncovered. No furtive glimpses during accidental meetings in his bedchamber, no bits and pieces of flesh between unlaced breeches and unbuttoned blouses, just skin—whole skin—a great, naked expanse of it.
He shrugs off his shirt. Lean muscle covers his torso, and I notice a scar bisecting his left breast. It is small, thin, silver, and glows in the soft firelight of the retiring room. He is slim, much slimmer than the solid working companions of my youth. Unbidden, the memory of Hans returns to me: thick, stocky, and brawny. As a girl I had thought his physique the pinnacle of masculinity. The pinnacle of strength. But the Goblin King belies all of that, nearly feminine in his elegance and grace. But there is nothing delicate about him, no softness about his belly and arms. The shadows play about him, carving the shapes and contours of his body into a work of art.
His eyes meet mine. The austere young man looks at me with a question in his gaze.
“Yes,” I say, but I scarcely know for what I am giving him permission. “Yes, you may.”
He breathes out in a long sigh. Those eyes, two-toned and otherworldly, are for once free of the burdens they’ve carried for so long. The burden of immortality. The burden of unending indifference. He has relinquished them to me. He smiles.
I understand then that the trust he gave me is power. It is not only the Goblin Queen who has the ability to bend the will of those around her; it is me. Elisabeth, entire. “Come here,” I say at last, holding out my hand. “Come and follow me into the light.”
He takes my hand and I guide him toward my bedchamber. Then I gather him into my arms and we fall together.
We lie like this for a moment. I am no longer his Goblin Queen; I am Elisabeth, mortal, human, warm. He is no longer my Goblin King; he is my husband, the man behind the mask of myth. All pretense fades away and we stare at each other, naked in mind and flesh and soul.
I kiss him. He kisses me back. It is an exploratory dance of lips and tongue, a language we are learning together. There is a hunger within me that still yearns to be fulfilled, to be filled with him, but for now, I revel in the sweetness that is this: this moment, this communion.
And we are met.
This time, I do not leave him. I am fully in my body as my sense of self falls apart. My mind is wiped clean. Tabula rasa. He has rewritten who I am down to the core. It is one long revelation where I build myself back together again.
Dimly I become aware of the Goblin King whispering my name over and over, a mantra, rosary, a prayer on his lips.
“Elisabeth,” he says. “Elisabeth, Elisabeth, Elisabeth.”
“Yes,” I answer. I am here. I am here at last.
I am the rhythm, he is the melody. I provide the basso continuo, he the improvisation.
“Yes,” I whisper in his ear. “Yes.”
When he returns to me, we lie there, our chests rising and falling with our breaths, slower and slower as our heartbeats calm, and the tides of our blood retreat. Lassitude overtakes me, a deep restfulness radiating from every part of me. He shifts and I am nestled in the crook of his shoulder, my nose rubbing against the hair of his chest, surprisingly soft.
We don’t say anything and I feel myself drifting to sleep, an inevitable, inexorable descent into dreams. But just before I fade from consciousness, I hear four words that are my undoing.
“I love you, Elisabeth.”
I hold him tighter to me, even as my heart unravels.
“By God, I love you so.”
THE BRAVE MAIDEN’S TALE
“Tell me a story,” I said.
The Goblin King and I lay in each other’s arms, nestled against each other’s hearts. His fingers lightly stroked the flesh of my upper arm, running them over the hill of my shoulder and down the valley between my breasts.
“Hmm?”
“Tell me a story,” I repeated.
“What sort of story?”
“A bedtime story. And let it have a happy ending.”
I felt the chuckle roll through him. “Is there one in particular you wish to hear?”
I paused. “Do you know,” I said in a small voice, “the true tale of the brave maiden?”
It was a long time before he answered. “Yes,” he said. “I know the true tale of the brave maiden. But I only know of it as a fairy tale, the story pieced together from bits of memory, both learned and inherited.”
“The story is not yours?”
A beat. “No.”
“Does the story not belong to Der Erlk?nig?”
“The story belongs to Der Erlk?nig,” the Goblin King replied, “but not to me.”
But not to me. It was the first time he had drawn such a clear delineation between himself and Der Erlk?nig. Between the man he had been and the myth he had become.
I held him tighter, nuzzling against his heartbeat. I pretended it was mortal, that it pulsed in time with mine. His seconds were my hours, his minutes my years.
“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a great king who lived Underground.”
I closed my eyes.