Yes, they hissed. You know of whom we speak.
I shook my head. I did know of whom they spoke; they spoke of Josef. But I wasn’t going to give my brother up to the goblins.
The changeling, mortal, they said. The one you freed with the power of a wish. We want it back. It has no place among you humans; it belongs down here. With us. With its kin, here in the Underground.
“No.”
Yes, they repeated.
“No!”
The hands tightened about me.
We want it, they said again. It is rightfully ours. Bring it back, maiden. Bring it back.
It. As though my baby brother were an animal. As though he didn’t have a name, a life, a personhood. Josef might have been a changeling, but he was no less human than me, than K?the, than all those who loved him.
“No,” I choked out. “He does not belong to you.”
Nor does he belong to you.
“No,” I gasped. “Josef belongs to himself.”
Those goblin hands squeezed tighter, and a sparkling blackness began to fill the corners of my vision. Your love is a cage, mortal. Set him free.
I laughed. It was lost amidst choking coughs as twining hands strangled the life from me, but I laughed nonetheless. I could no more stop loving Sepperl than I could stop the sun from rising each dawn.
Your love is killing him.
My laughs turned to sobs. Tears leaked from my eyes, scalding hot and salty. They tasted of my reluctance, my despair, but most of all, my love for the little changeling boy who stayed in the world above because he wanted to play music. Josef had died all those years ago, but my true brother, the brother of my heart, still lived. My tears dripped onto goblin hands, staining them with love.
A hiss of pain rose from them all, a collective susurrus like the sighing of branches in the wood. Multi-jointed fingers uncurled from my wrists, my arms, my waist, dropping me to the ground.
It burns! they cried. It burns!
Once released, I coughed and gulped down great gasps of air as all around me, echoes of It burns! It burns! blended with warnings of Your love is killing him into a symphony of discord.
I lay on my side, there on the floor of the dirty corridor, long after the goblin hands had disappeared. For although their voices had faded away, the damning words remained.
Your love is killing him.
*
I don’t know how long I lay there, crushed beneath the crippling weight of my doubt.
As long as you have a reason to love, Thistle had said. Love kept the wheel of life turning. Love created bridges between worlds. If there was nothing else I had learned, I had learned that love was greater than the old laws.
But uncertainty crept over me on silent wings, whispering in the changeling’s voice: None of us have lasted long in the world above.
I might have lain there in the dust and dirt, save for my promise to the Goblin King. There’s a fire within you; keep it alight. Move or die. If I could not walk, I would crawl. If I did not know the answers now, I would discover them later. While there was breath, there was time. I got to my feet.
And then, faintly, a violin began to play.
I closed my eyes. I had expected obstacles, physical trials to overcome, but the Underground knew to attack me where I was the most vulnerable: my heart.
It’s not Josef. It’s not the Goblin King. It is a trick, I chanted to myself. The mantra had saved me before, when K?the and I trod these paths to fight our way back to the surface. But the words no longer possessed the power they once had and, almost against my will, my feet followed the sounds to a large cavern.
It was the ballroom. The ballroom that held the Goblin Ball, where the Goblin King and I had danced together for the first time. It was also the room where we had greeted our subjects as husband and wife. But it was empty now, no beautiful or otherworldly decorations, no banquet tables laid with bloody feasts. Yet in the center sat a quartet of musicians: a violinist, a keyboardist, a violoncellist, and a flautist.
The violoncellist and flautist held their instruments in their laps, their hands still. The other two were playing a slow, mournful piece, which I immediately recognized as the adagio from the Wedding Night Sonata. The violinist wore Josef’s face, but no glamour could fool me; the changeling could imitate my brother’s golden curls and delicate features, but he could never, ever recreate Josef’s skill.
In the changeling’s hands, my music was flat and uninspired. The notes thunked and thudded to the floor, carrying no emotion, no weight, no meaning. I had put so much of my frustration into this movement; the desire to go faster, go further, only to be met with denial at every turn. I had wanted the music to unsettle and agitate; instead it merely bored.
I ran forward to snatch my music off the stands, to take it back, when the violoncellist spoke.
“You waste your talent on this drivel.”
I startled. Papa.