“The last time, it was a beautiful maiden,” I said from my spot by K?the’s side.
“A brave maiden,” the Goblin King corrected.
I smiled.
“His soul was the price,” he continued. “The price he paid to sunder the goblins and the fey from the world above. His soul—and his name. No longer a mortal man, he became Der Erlk?nig. For his bargain, the foolish man was granted immortality, and the power to manipulate the elements as it suited his needs. He restored order, seasons progressed in their normal manner. But the further away from mortality he grew, the more capricious and cruel he became, forgetting what it was like to live and love.”
He was right; it wasn’t a pretty story. What did immortality do to one who was once mortal? It stretched him thin. I watched what little I could see of the Goblin King from my vantage point. In this half-light, in this half-space between the Underground and the world above, I thought I could see the mortal man he might have been. The austere young man in the portrait gallery. That soft-eyed young man who had been my friend.
“It isn’t just the life of a maiden I needed, you know,” the Goblin King said quietly. I glanced sharply at him; his tone had changed. “It was what a maiden can give me.”
“And what is that?”
His smile was crooked. “Passion.”
Heat flared in my cheeks.
“Not that sort of passion,” he said quickly. Did I imagine things, or were his cheeks tinged a faint pink? “Well, yes, that too. Passion of all sorts,” he said. “Intensity.”
“Goblins do not feel the way mortals do,” he went on. “You humans live and love so fiercely. We crave that. We need that. That fire sustains us. It sustains me.”
“Is that why you stole K?the away?” I looked at my sister, thinking of her voluptuous body and inviting laugh. “Because of the passion she inspired?”
The Goblin King shook his head. “The sort of passion she inspires in me is all flash and no heat. I need an ember, Elisabeth, not a firecracker. Something that burns longer, to keep me warm for this night and all other nights to come.”
“So K?the…”
I could not finish my question.
“K?the,” he said in a low voice, “was a means to an end.”
The way he spoke of my sister vexed me. A means, as though she were cheap. Disposable. Worthless.
“To what end?” I asked.
“You know the answer, Elisabeth,” he said softly.
And I did. The goblin merchants, the flute, all the way back to when he had granted my wish to save Josef’s life—everything he had done, he had done for me.
“A means to an end,” I whispered. “Me.”
He did not deny it.
“Why?”
The Goblin King was silent for a long while. “Who else but you?” he asked lightly. “Whose life would you rather it be?”
He was avoiding answering my question. We did not look at each other. The darkness was too complete, and the light from the world above too harsh. But I could feel an answer between us, pulsing like a heartbeat. It made my breath come faster.
“Me,” I said, a little more loudly. “Why me?”
“Why not you?” he returned. “Why not the girl who played her music for me in the Goblin Grove when she was a child?”
He had said so much, yet nothing I wanted to hear. That he desired me. That he had chosen me. That he … I wanted to hear the truth in his eyes said aloud. I could feel his gaze upon every part of my body: on my neck, where my shoulder disappeared into the torn sleeves of my blouse, the line of my collarbone as it led to my décolletage, the swell and ebb of my breasts as I breathed. I had waited for this my entire life, I realized. Not to be found beautiful—but desirable. Wanted. I wanted the Goblin King to claim me as his own.
“Why me?” I repeated. “Why Maria Elisabeth Ingeborg Vogler?”
I held his eyes with mine. He had his pride, but so had I. If I were to make good on the promise I made that little dancing boy in the wood all those years ago, I needed to hear validation from his own lips.
“Because,” he said. “Because I loved the music within you.”
I closed my eyes. His words were the spark to the tinder lining my blood; they touched my heart and warmth blazed from within, spreading through me like wildfire.
“A life for a life,” I said. “Does that mean … does that mean the sacrifice must die?”
“What does it mean to die?” the Goblin King asked. “What does it mean to live?”
“I told you I don’t find the philosopher charming.”
A laugh, a real, startled, human laugh. “There is,” he said, “no one like you, Elisabeth.”
“Answer my question.”
The Goblin King paused. “Yes. The sacrifice must die. She must leave the world of the living and enter the realm of Der Erlk?nig, enter the Underground.” He lifted his eyes to mine, those mismatched eyes, so startling, so beautiful. “She will be dead to the world above.”
Dead to the world above. I thought of Papa, Mother, Constanze, Hans, and, with a painful twinge, Josef. In many ways, I was already dead.
“We have both lost,” I said.