Wintersong(10)

“Gone?” I struggled to gather my fallen composure and cover my exposed longing. “What do you mean? Gone where?”

“Just gone.” She sucked at a loose tooth.

“I sent Josef to fetch her.”

She shrugged. “She’s not anywhere in the inn, and your red cloak is missing.”

“I’ll go look for her,” Hans offered.

“No, I will,” I said hurriedly. I needed to put my mind and body back into their proper spaces. I needed to get away from him and find myself in the woods.

My grandmother’s dark eyes bored into me. “How did you choose, girlie?” she asked softly. She was hunched over her gnarled cane like a bird of prey, her black shawl draped over her shoulders like crow’s wings.

The memory of the goblin fruit’s bloody flesh running down my sister’s face and fingers returned to me. Josef is not the only who needs looking after. I felt sick.

“Hurry,” Constanze urged. “I fear she is for the Goblin King now.”

I ran out of the kitchen and into the great hall, wiping my hands on my apron. I took a shawl from the rack, wrapped it about my shoulders, and went in search of my sister.

*

I did not venture far into the woods, thinking K?the would keep close to home. Unlike Josef or me, she had never felt any particular kinship with the trees and stones and babbling brooks in the forest. She did not like mud, or dirt, or damp, and preferred to stay inside, where it was warm, where she might primp and be pampered.

Yet my sister was in none of her usual haunts. Ordinarily, the farthest she ventured was to the stables (we owned no horses, but the guests occasionally traveled on horseback), and sometimes to the woodshed, where the tame grasses surrounding our inn ended and the wild edges of the forest began.

There was the faint, impossible scent of summer peaches ripening on the breeze.

Constanze’s warning echoed in my mind. She is for the Goblin King now. I wrapped my shawl tighter about me and hurried off the footpath into the woods.

Past the woodshed, past the creek that ran behind our inn, deep in the wild heart of the forest, was a circle of alder trees we called the Goblin Grove. The trees grew in such a way as to suggest twisted arms and monstrous limbs frozen in an eternal dance, and Constanze liked to tell us that the trees had once been humans—naughty young women—who displeased Der Erlk?nig. As children we had played here, Josef and me, played and sang and danced, offering our music to the Lord of Mischief. The Goblin King was the silhouette around which my music was composed, and the Goblin Grove was the place my shadows came to life.

I spied a scarlet shape in the woods ahead of me. K?the in my cloak, walking to my sacred space. An irrational, petty slash of irritation cut through my dread and unease. The Goblin Grove was my haunt, my refuge, my sanctuary. Why must she take everything that was mine? My sister had a gift for turning the extraordinary into the ordinary. Unlike my brother and me—who lived in the ether of magic and music—K?the lived in the world of the real, the tangible, the mundane. Unlike us, she never had faith.

Mist curled in about the edges of my vision, blurring the distance between spaces, making near seem far and far seem near. The Goblin Grove was but a few minutes’ walk from our inn, but time seemed to be playing tricks on me, and it felt as though I had been walking both forever and not at all.

Then I remembered time—like memory—was just another one of the Goblin King’s playthings, a toy he could bend and stretch at will.

“K?the!” I called. But my sister did not hear me.

As a child, I’d pretended to see him, Der Erlk?nig, this mysterious ruler underground. No one knew what he looked like, and no one knew what his true nature was, but I did. He looked like a boy, a youth, a man, whatever I needed him to be. He was playful, serious, interesting, confusing, but he was my friend, always my friend. It was make-believe, true, but even make-believe was a sort of belief.

But those were the imaginings of a little girl, Constanze told me. The Goblin King was none of the things I knew him to be. He was the Lord of Mischief—mercurial, melancholy, seductive, beautiful—but he was, above all, dangerous.

Dangerous? little Liesl had asked. Dangerous how?

Dangerous as a winter wind, which freezes the marrow from within, and not like a blade, which slashes the throat from without.

But I was not to worry, for only beautiful women were vulnerable to the Goblin King’s charms. They were his weakness, and he was theirs; they wanted him—sinuous and fey and untamable—the way they wanted to hold on to candle flame or mist. Because I was not beautiful, I never felt the weight of Constanze’s warnings about the Goblin King. Because K?the was not imaginative, she never had either.

And now I feared for us both.

“K?the!” I called again.

I picked up my skirts and my pace, running after my sister. But no matter how quickly I ran, the distance between us never closed. K?the continued walking in her slow, steady way, yet I never managed to overtake her. She was as far from me as when I had first set out after her.

My sister stepped into the Goblin Grove and paused. She glanced over her shoulder, straight at me, but she never saw me. Her eyes scanned the woods, searching for something—or someone—specific.

Suddenly she wasn’t alone. There in the Goblin Grove, standing by my sister’s side as though he had always been there, was the tall, elegant stranger from the marketplace. He wore his cloak and hood, which hid his face from me, but K?the gazed up at him with a look of adoration.