“I hear no genius in the notes, no inspiration in their arrangement. This should all be burned in the rubbish heap.” He turned to me. “Ah, Liesl. Do you not agree?”
I closed my eyes. Papa was by turns autocratic and convivial, depending on how many drinks were in him. I could never guess which version of my father I would be facing, so I took care never to face him at all.
“Well?”
I tried to cling to those moments with the Goblin King when we had been both lost and found in my music. When we had both been transported by sound and rapture, when nothing else had existed outside the time we played together. But I could not hold them, as Papa and my doubt wrenched them from my fingers.
“No,” I whispered. “No, I do not agree.”
I could hear the scrape of the chair push back as the violoncellist stood to his feet. A changeling, I told myself. It is a changeling. Not Papa. It can’t be Papa.
“No?” Papa’s voice was closer now, and the stink of stale beer overwhelmed me. “What have I told you, Liesl?”
If I opened my eyes, if I looked my father in the eyes, the illusion would be broken. I would see black goblin eyes in a human face, and know him for a changeling. But I couldn’t open my eyes, couldn’t face the possibility that it might not be true.
“You will never amount to anything.”
I flinched, expecting the blow of a violin bow like a rod upon my skin. He had broken several bows that way, bent against our backs as punishment.
“You overreach yourself. Grow up and stop indulging in these romantic flights of fancy.”
His voice seemed to come from the cracks, the nooks and crannies through which the wind from the world above whistled and wuthered. I tried to stand my ground, tried to push against the cruelty he wielded like a scythe, but I was shriveling, curling, drying up inside.
“Stand in the world above as you are, Elisabeth Vogler, and be judged as your father judged you: talentless, forgettable, worthless.”
Elisabeth.
Papa never called me Elisabeth. Within our family I was always Liesl, occasionally Lisette, and sometimes even Bettina. But my father never called me by my full name; it was a name reserved for friends, acquaintances, and the Goblin King. It was a name for the woman I had claimed myself to be, not the girl I had been.
“Then let the world judge me as I am.”
I opened my eyes. The changeling who wore Papa’s face had done a good job of it; the ruddy cheeks, the sunken eyes, the patchy skin. But his face held a malice that my father never had, an intentional cruelty that could be wielded with precision. Papa was a blunt instrument, his blows made indiscriminate by drink.
“Stand aside,” I said, “and let me pass.”
The changeling smiled, and his features shifted. “As you wish, mortal,” he said, giving me a sweeping bow. Then he snatched the Wedding Night Sonata from the stand, the sheets of paper written all in my own hand, and began to rip them apart.
“No!” I cried, but the flautist came to hold me, while the others joined the first in shredding my music to pieces. The changelings savaged my work, bits of paper floating and falling in the air like snow, settling in my hair, my eyes, my mouth, tasting of bitterness and betrayal.
So much lost. So much effort, all to ash. Those early works Papa had burned in retribution for burning Josef’s face. The pieces I had written in secret, all sacrificed to gain entrance to the Underground and save my sister. And now this, my latest and possibly greatest, all gone, gone, gone.
I screamed and sobbed, but it was only after the last few notes had fallen to the floor that the changelings released me.
“No matter,” said one cheerfully. “I’m sure you can recreate it, if you’ve the talent you claim.”
Then they abandoned me in the empty cavernous ballroom, the echoes of their spiteful laughter ringing in my ears.
*
I arrived at the shores of the Underground lake.
I had been stripped of everything—my confidence, my esteem, my music—but still I forced myself onward. They could take everything else away from me, but I had myself, entire. Elisabeth was more than the woman who bore the name, more than the notes she produced, more than the people who defined her. I was filled with myself, for they could not take my soul.
I glanced about. I had come to an unfamiliar shore, and could see no barge or skiff to bear me across. I stared across the great black expanse. Its glassy surface seemed deceptively calm, but beneath those obsidian depths, danger lurked.
The Lorelei.
As though called by my thoughts, glistening shapes rippled beneath the water. I squared my shoulders. I had come this far. I had faced the goblins. I had faced the changelings. I would face the Lorelei. If I could not row across, then I would swim.
There was no way through but down.
I took a step into the lake and gasped when the water touched my skin. It was cold; colder than ice, colder than winter, colder than despair.