“What?”
He lifted his head. “His name,” he said softly, “was Brother Mahieu.”
A monk. A monk of no consequence even, one who had passed from the world above without leaving a mark. Yet the Goblin King remembered him. The Goblin King had clearly loved him, and it was in his love that the beloved old teacher lived on. This was the immortality humans were meant to have: to be remembered by those who loved us long after our bodies had crumbled into dust.
I thought of my brother and sister, those who still loved me, and remembered. They were waiting for me in the world above, and I felt the wings of tomorrow settle over me. Too soon. It was too soon.
“What was he like?” I asked, my back still turned to the Goblin King. “Did he raise you? Who were your parents? How came you to the abbey? What—”
“Elisabeth.”
I still did not face him. I was not ready.
“Tomorrow has come.”
I shook my head, but we were past the point of no return. I had made my choice. I had chosen myself. I had chosen selfishness.
The Goblin King sensed my hesitation. “Don’t regret your decision to live.”
“I don’t,” I whispered. “And I won’t.” It wasn’t a lie, but neither was it entirely the truth.
“Elisabeth.”
I tensed.
“Elisabeth, look at me.”
Slowly, reluctantly, I turned around. There was a light shining in his eyes, a light that would remember me, long after I had faded from both the Underground and the world above. And those eyes … those eyes were brilliant gems. They changed his face utterly. His beauty no longer seemed so unsettling or uncanny, so preternaturally flawless. There was a vividness to his face, and it made him seem young. Vulnerable.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The question fell like a raindrop between us, pinging the glass quiet that enveloped us both.
“I am Der Erlk?nig, the Lord of Mischief and the King Underground.”
I shook my head. “No, that is what you are. Who are you?”
“I am the Goblin King, your immortal beloved, your eternal lover.”
He was Der Erlk?nig, and he was my Goblin King, but I wanted to know who he was to himself. His name was the last bit of him I could not have.
“No,” I said. “I know who you are.”
Teeth slipped from his grin. “Who am I?”
“You are a man with music in his soul. You are capricious, contrary, contradictory. You delight in childish games, and delight even more in winning. For a man of such intense piety, you are surprisingly petty. You are a gentleman, a virtuoso, a scholar, and a martyr, and of those masks, I like the martyr least of all. You are austere, you are pompous, you are pretentious, you are foolish.”
The Goblin King did not reply.
“Well?” I asked. “Do I have the right of it?”
“Yes,” he said thickly. “Yes, you have the very soul of me, Elisabeth.”
“Then your name, mein Herr.”
He laughed softly, but it was a gasp of pain, not of joy. “No.”
“Why?”
“So you will forget me,” he said simply. “You cannot love a man with no name.”
I shook my head. “That’s not true.”
“A name is something that belongs to a mortal man.” There was an expression I couldn’t quite decipher in his mismatched eyes. “And the man I was is back there—back in the world above.”
He pulled me close to him. I was nestled in his embrace, against the scar that crossed his heart.
“Find me,” he said, his voice low. “Find me there, Elisabeth. It’s only there, in the world above, that you will find the last bit of me.”
He let me go. But he was not just releasing me from his embrace; he was releasing me. He was releasing the girl who once played her music for him in the wood, the girl he had broken open to set her soul free, the girl to whom he had given himself, entire.
With a hitching breath, I reached into my pocket and withdrew his wolf’s-head ring, the ring he had set upon my finger the night we wed.
The Goblin King shook his head, closing my fingers around the ring. “Keep it.”
“But … is it not a symbol of your power?”
“It is.” He smiled sadly. “But it is only a symbol, Elisabeth. Of my power, yes, but also of my promise to you. Whatever else, I gave that ring to you in earnest, as a husband to a wife.”
I wrapped my hand around his ring and pressed it against my heart. “How … how is it to be done? How are we to be”—I swallowed—“parted?”
“We made our vows in this room,” the Goblin King said. “And so we can unmake them too.”
A chalice of wine appeared on the altar. He reached for the goblet, then hesitated.
“I cannot … I cannot help you. Once we break our troth, your power as the Goblin Queen, Der Erlk?nig’s protection … it will all be gone. Have you the courage to make the way on your own?”
I did not. But I nodded just the same.
“The … the others will not make it easy. But I have faith, Elisabeth. Faith in you.”