I shrank beneath his scrutiny.
“Well!” the tailor said, sweeping his hand over the shop. “Welcome to my humble atelier. We’ve been dressing brides of Der Erlk?nig since time immemorial, so you’ve come to the right place if you are in need of attire befitting a queen. What can I do you for?”
My eyes wandered over the beautiful gowns on display. They were all several years out of date—some even older than that. I ran my hands over the gowns. Although the fabrics were sumptuous, rich, and beautiful, the gowns themselves had been skillfully repaired. Nothing, not even goblin hands, could stop the wear and tear of time on these gorgeous pieces. The more I looked, the more I realized that everything around me was crumbling, decaying, dying.
It was only then that I understood these dresses had belonged to my predecessors. My rivals. I immediately quashed the thought.
The tailor sidled forward, his long, multi-jointed fingers caressing the dress form closest to me.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Beautiful, isn’t it? The color of storms and oceans, or so we’ve been told. This dress,” he continued, “belonged to Magdalena. She was beautiful—the way you mortals reckon, anyhow—beautiful, but stupid. Oh ho, we had fun with this one, we did, but we used her up too soon. Her fire died, leaving us cold and dark.”
The dress form beneath the gown was tall and well-formed, the bosom and hips generous, the waist tiny. The dress, a robe à la fran?aise, was made from a deep, jewel-toned blue silk, and I could imagine the dramatic coloring of the woman who had worn it: pale skin, dark hair, and blue eyes to match her gown. A breathless beauty, a glittering jewel, and I imagined the Goblin King partaking of her loveliness over and over again, biting the sweet peaches of her cheeks until she was gone.
“And this one,” Thistle chimed in, pointing to another dress form, “belonged to Maria Emmanuel. Prissy, she was. Refused to do her duty by her lord. She was consecrated to someone else—a carpenter? Something like that. Don’t know what the king saw in her, but they were both possessed of a strange devotion to a figure nailed to a wooden cross. She lasted the longest, this prudish nun, not having given herself to king and land, and during her rule, our kingdom suffered. Yet she lasted the longest for that, although she too died in the end, pining for the world above she could see but not touch.”
This dress form was slim, the gown that hung on it made of an austere gray wool. I could imagine the woman who wore this dress—a pious creature, veiled like a bride of Christ. No beauty, but her eyes would be a clear, luminous gray, shining with the fervor of her passion and faith. Not like Magdalena, whose loveliness would have been carnal and earthly; Maria Emmanuel would have glowed with an inner light, the beauty of a saint or a martyr. The Goblin King was a man of varied tastes, it seemed.
On and on, Thistle and the tailor went through the litany of brides, but their names and histories blurred quickly from my mind, their lives faded from memory. This was not a clothier’s shop; this was a mausoleum, the dress forms all that remained of each previous bride. Reduced to the fabric she wore. I wondered what gown my dress form would wear, once the Goblin King had used me up.
“What of the first Goblin Queen?” I asked. “Where is her dress form?”
Three pairs of black eyes blinked at me. Then Thistle and the tailor exchanged looks.
“She doesn’t have one,” Twig said.
“She doesn’t?” I glanced around the shop, mannequins of all shapes and sizes standing in an array. “Why not?”
Thistle gave Twig a vicious pinch, but the taller goblin girl waved her off.
“Because,” Twig said, “she lived.”
The room spun around me, the mannequins and goblins tilting and twirling in a swirl of color and shadow.
“She lived,” I echoed. “How do you mean?”
The goblins were unwontedly quiet. The brave maiden must have found a way to escape the Underground with her life, without having condemned the world above to an eternal winter. How was that possible?
“What was her name?” I whispered.
“Her name is lost to us,” Twig said.
“Forgotten, not lost,” Thistle interrupted. “Stricken from our memory. We do not honor her.”
“Understand this, mortal,” the tailor said. “What the old laws giveth, they taketh away. Do not think she walked away from us unscathed, unbroken, or whole. You are dead, maiden. Your life is ours.”
“I thought my life belonged to the Goblin King.”
The goblins burst into their strange laughter. “And to whom,” Thistle said, “do you think his life belongs?”
Their smiles were row upon row of jagged teeth. I shuddered.
“Now, why don’t we find you a nice gown for your dinner with Der Erlk?nig?” the tailor asked. “We have some lovely new fabrics taken from the world above. Still warm from their owners’ now-cooling bodies, if I don’t miss my guess.”