“But there is still so much work to do,” I protested. “The theme is sound but the middle passages are—oh!”
A drop of blood fell on the ivory keys. Puzzled, I wiped it away, when another drop fell on my hand. Then another. And another. The Goblin King rushed forward and pressed a kerchief to my nose. Red stained the snow-white linen, blooming across the fabric at an alarming rate. Suddenly, the world wound down and time slowed to a halt. My thoughts, a fleet-footed hart running through the woods of my mind, stumbled and fell.
Blood?
“Rest.” The word was as much a command as a caress. The Goblin King clapped his hands, and Twig and Thistle appeared, one holding a glass tumbler, the other a bottle of a rich amber liquor. He poured me a drink and handed it to me without another word.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Brandy.”
“What for?”
“Just drink it.”
I wrinkled my nose, but took a sip, feeling the burn of the liquor slide down my throat and warm my heart. He watched me carefully as I finished the drink.
“There,” he said. “Feel better?”
I blinked. To my surprise, I did. My hands, which had shaken and twitched with years of pent-up frustration, were finally still. I reached up to touch my face. My nosebleed had stopped, and so had the torrent of song that had flooded from me in the past few days.
“Now.” The Goblin King took away the glass and sat beside me on the bench. “We’ve been playing your music for a long time. Let us pass the time in other ways.”
He took my face in his hands and leaned in close, concern in those remarkable eyes. The tenderness there undid me, and a fire of an entirely different sort blossomed within me. The Goblin King gently stroked my cheek and I closed my eyes to breathe him in.
“Have you any suggestions, mein Herr?”
His lips brushed against my ear. “I have a few ideas.”
I was wound tighter than a violin string, pitched too sharp, and I urged his rough, callused fingertips lower, loosening me, tuning me to the right key.
“We could put down the quill and the bow, and play each other instead,” I murmured.
The Goblin King paused and drew back. I opened my eyes to meet his gaze, but instead of desire, I saw something else: worry.
The longer you burn the candle …
Suddenly, the bloodstained handkerchief seemed like an omen.
But I pushed the foreboding away. I was happy. I was fulfilled. I had music at my fingertips and a willing performer at my beck and call. The Goblin King was a consummate player of violins and of women, and the skill with which he plied both was extraordinary. My arms, my breasts, my stomach, my thighs; he could wring such exquisite emotion from me with just the softest flick of his tongue, the merest touch of his lips. I was in the hands of a virtuoso.
So I kissed him, kissed him with ardor and heat, burning away his worry and my doubt. I felt his concern warm into something altogether more pleasurable beneath my lips, and I traced my hands down his arms, drawing him close.
I let the Goblin King play me the rest of the evening, the sonata, the bloodstained handkerchief, and the candle forgotten for the time being. He was the bow, I the strings, and his fingers brushed my body to make me sing.
*
The Goblin King was gone when I awoke. At some point during the night he had put me to bed, but had not joined me there. Where my husband went in his private hours, I did not know, but I thought I could hear the distant, dreamy sound of his violin.
The mirror above my mantel showed the Goblin Grove bathed in an eerie half-light, either dawn or dusk, I could not tell. The alders were in full bloom in the world above, awakened to spring before the rest of the forest. I smiled and rose from my bed.
The retiring room was empty.
“He’s not here,” said a cackle from the shadows. Thistle.
“I know.” The Goblin King had not taken his violin from its stand in the retiring room. It rested in the hands of a leering satyr, its clawed fingers running down the curves of the instrument. Yet I could still hear those faint, ghostly strains, familiar yet unrecognizable. “Do you hear that?”
Thistle’s bat-wing ears twitched. “Hear what?”
“The music,” I said. I ran my fingers over the Goblin King’s violin. “I thought it was Der Erlk?nig.”
We listened. The playing was too faint for me to identify what I was hearing, but Thistle’s ears were sharper than mine. After a moment, she shook her head.
“I hear nothing.”
Did she lie? It would be like my goblin girl to mislead me, but Thistle watched me with an unreadable expression on her face, neither mocking nor sympathetic. For once, I thought she might be telling the truth.
Perhaps it was all in my mind. I heard music in my mind at all times, but it was never quite this literal. This music wasn’t within me; it was beyond me.