Once I was properly dressed and suitably fed, I felt much better equipped to face whatever was to come. After questioning both Twig and Thistle, I discovered that the world underground had corridors and thresholds, but no windows or doors. Goblins had no concept of privacy, and there had never been a need to shut an entrance. My barrow room had been sealed for my comfort. Orders of the Goblin King.
“Can you also conjure things from the earth?” I asked my goblin girls.
They nodded.
“Then conjure me a door. With a lock on it.”
It was a while before they understood exactly what I needed. Thistle and Twig took my descriptions and fitted me with a circular door, odd but satisfactory. The lock was a strange device of their own invention, but serviceable. We three were the only ones with a key.
My barrow opened into a corridor. Like my room, it was a mixture of natural and unnatural elements: dirt-packed floors and wrought-iron decorations. Goblin art was both frightening and beautiful; it emulated human art with an extraordinary degree of skillful imitation, but the subjects were not lofty. They were entirely terrestrial. The sconces along the wall were carved not into the shapes of flowers and angels; they were grown from tree roots into the shape of an arm clutching its torch. The paintings on the wall did not depict the traditional scenes of grandeur and glory; they were mostly landscapes. Woods and mountains, streams and brooks, rendered with such precision they seemed like windows to the world above. It alleviated the sense of being trapped underground.
Thistle and Twig led me along the corridor to a grand hall. Like the ballroom, this space was a cavern of stone with tall, arched ceilings and dripping icicles of glittering rock. Above, the fairy lights danced like stars in the night sky. But I saw not a single goblin, not of Twig and Thistle’s ilk, closer to the earth than humankind.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Working,” Twig said, as though it were the most obvious answer in the world.
“Working?” I had not thought that goblins worked; at least, not in the way humans did in the world above. It made me wonder: where did goblin food come from? Where did their clothes? Their furniture? Did they have goblin farmers? Goblin craftsmen? Constanze’s stories never told me much about the Underground itself, only what happened when its denizens trespassed into the world above. Always fighting, always tricking, always stealing, the goblins always sought to take away what did not belong to them.
“What,” Thistle said sourly. “Did you think all this was created by magic?” She waved her long, many-jointed fingers about the great hall.
“Well, yes,” I admitted. “Couldn’t you just … wish this all into existence?”
The goblin girls laughed, their cackling giggles echoing up the walls like skittering roach feet.
“Mortal, you know nothing about the power of wishes,” Thistle said. “What the old laws giveth, they taketh in return.”
I thought of the careless wishes I had thrown around, and a whisper of foreboding touched me.
“All must be in balance,” Twig explained. “Ever since we were sundered from the world above and driven Underground, we were granted the power to travel as we wished. But nothing comes for free, mistress, and we built this kingdom with our own hands. Now, you must excuse us, mistress,” she said. “We have other duties to which we must attend.” She pointed above our heads. “The fairy lights will guide you to your sister.”
I looked up at the ceiling. A shower of bright motes began to fall about me like snow, resting lightly on my shoulders and hair. I laughed; magic or no, it was enchanting. It tickled. The fairy lights spun about me before resolving into a golden stream of light. I followed the path down the hall and into another corridor.
K?the’s barrow room was on the other side of the great hall. The corridor leading to her room looked very much like mine, but the human touch on this side of the Underground was stronger. The paintings hung on the walls were similar to what we might see in the gallery of a great estate: portraits and pastoral scenes, all showing the Goblin King.
At first I was inclined to dismiss them as yet another self-aggrandizing display of Der Erlk?nig, but as I walked farther down the timeline of portraits, I noticed something curious. The fashions and artistic hand changed and shifted through the centuries—as to be expected—but so too did the sitter.
I did not notice the changing faces at first, for each successive portrait showed kinship with its predecessor. Yet there were subtle differences between them all that one could not simply attribute to differing artists. They all shared similar features—the long, elfin face, high cheekbones, preternatural and relentless symmetry—but the slope of the jaw, the set of the eyes, as well as the colors of the irises, were each as distinct as a snowflake in a storm. They were all different men, and yet, at the same time, they were all Der Erlk?nig.