“You have to give me a chance.”
He crossed his arms. “No.”
“A gentleman would honor the rules.”
“Ah, but I am not a gentleman, Elisabeth.” The Goblin King was all affectation and languid sarcasm. “I am a king.”
Realization swept over me in a wave. “You were never going to let me win.”
“No.” He bared his teeth. “After all, am I not the Lord of Mischief?”
The Lord of Mischief. Of course.
“Then why play this game?” I asked. “Why bother with all this when you could have simply taken what you wanted?”
An unfathomable expression flashed across his eyes. Suddenly he seemed terribly old—old and weary. I was reminded that Der Erlk?nig had existed in these mountains and woods longer than I, longer than time itself.
“I do not want this.” The words were soft, so soft I might have imagined them. “I never wanted this.”
Surprise slashed through me, leaving me cold and breathless. “Mein Herr,” I said. “Then what…”
The Goblin King laughed. His face, previously old and haggard, took on a puckish expression. His features sharpened: his gaze hard and glittering, his cheekbones a slash of shadow.
“What did you think the answer would be, Elisabeth? I toy with you because I can. Because it gives me great pleasure. Because I was bored.”
An inarticulate scream of rage strangled me. I wanted to destroy something, to spend my anger against the unfairness of everything. I wanted nothing more than to grapple with the Goblin King, to tear him from limb to limb, a Maenad against Orpheus. I tightened my hands into fists.
“Yes,” he murmured. “Go ahead. Hit me. Strike me.” The invitation was not just in his words, but his voice. He advanced. “Use your rage against me.”
We stared at each other, scarcely half a breath between us. This close, I could see that his gray eye was flecked with silver and blue, his green one ringed with amber and gold. Those eyes mocked me, inviting and inciting me into a passion. If I were a smoldering ember, he was the poker, stirring me into flames.
I retreated. I was afraid. Afraid to touch him for fear of starting a fire within me.
“What,” I asked tightly, “do you want from me, mein Herr?”
“I already told you what I want,” he said. “You, entire.”
We did not relinquish each other’s gaze. Let go, his eyes seemed to say. But I couldn’t; if I surrendered to my fury, I wasn’t certain what else I would give up.
“Why?” My voice was hoarse.
“Why what, Elisabeth?”
“Why me?” My words were barely audible, but the Goblin King heard them. He had always heard me.
“Why you?” Those sharp, pointed teeth glistened. “Who else but you?” Even his words were sharp, each slicing through me like a knife. “You, who have always been my playmate?”
Childish laughter rang in my ears, but it was more memory than sound, the memory of a little girl and a little boy, dancing together in the wood. He, the king of the goblins, and she, an innkeeper’s daughter. No, a musician’s daughter. No, a musician herself.
A wife, said the little boy. I need a wife. Will you marry me someday?
The little musician laughed.
Just give me a chance, Elisabeth.
“A chance,” I whispered. “Give me a chance to win. The moon has not yet risen.”
The Goblin King said nothing for a long moment. “The game is unwinnable,” he said at last. “For either you or me.”
I shook my head. “I must try.”
“Oh, Elisabeth.” The way he said my name reached out and stroked some inner part of me. “One could almost admire your tenacity, if it weren’t so foolish.”
I opened my mouth to speak, to plead my case, but he placed his long fingers against my lips and silenced me.
“Very well,” he said. “One last chance. One last game. Find your sister, and I shall let the both of you go.”
“Is that all?”
His only response was a smile, more scary than soothing.
“Fine,” I said, my voice shaking. “Come, K?the, let us be gone from here.”
But she did not come.
“K?the?”
I whirled around, but I was alone, my sister vanished. Again.
Find your sister.
I did scream then. The cavern shook with my screams, of rage, of self-loathing, of hatred, of despair. The world around me shifted again, and I was once more in that strange and eerie forest, out in the cold with the stars above. The sky was clear, and the stars watched from a dispassionate distance.
I was in the world above.
“Oh no,” I said. “No, no, no, no.”
In the woods, only the echoes of Der Erlk?nig’s mocking laugh lingered.
“You bastard!” I raged. “Come out and fight fair!”
And there he was, standing in a distant grove with K?the in his arms, her limp body draped across his arms like an altar cloth, her head falling back, her arms splayed. They formed a twisted sort of pietà: the Goblin King the smirking mourner, my sister the dead martyr.