Wintersong(3)

“Promises, eh?” Constanze cackled. “You make so many, but how many of them can you keep?”

“What—” I began, but when I turned to face her, my grandmother was gone.

*

Downstairs, K?the had taken my red cloak off its peg, but I plucked it from her hands and settled it about my own shoulders. The last time Hans had brought us gifts from his father’s fabric goods store—before his proposal to K?the, before everything between us changed—he had given us a beautiful bolt of heavy wool. For the family, he’d said, but everyone had known the gift was for me. The bolt of wool was a deep blood-red, perfectly suited to my darker coloring and warming to my sallow complexion. Mother and Constanze had made me a winter cloak from the cloth, and K?the made no secret of how much she coveted it.

We passed our father playing dreamy old airs on his violin in the main hall. I looked around for our guests, but the room was empty, the hearth cold and the coals dead. Papa still wore his clothes from the night before, and the whiff of stale beer lingered about him like mist.

“Where’s Mother?” K?the asked.

Mother was nowhere to be seen, which was probably why Papa felt bold enough to play out here in the main hall, where anyone might hear him. The violin was a sore point between our parents; money was tight, and Mother would rather Papa play his instrument for hire than pleasure. But perhaps Master Antonius’s imminent arrival had loosened Mother’s purse strings as well as her heartstrings. The renowned virtuoso was to stop at our inn on his way from Vienna to Munich in order to audition my little brother.

“Likely taking a nap,” I ventured. “We were up before dawn, scrubbing out the rooms for Master Antonius.”

Our father was a violinist nonpareil, who had once played with the finest court musicians in Salzburg. It was in Salzburg, Papa would boast, where he had had the privilege of playing with Mozart, one of the late, great composer’s concertos. Genius like that, Papa said, comes only once in a lifetime. Once in two lifetimes. But sometimes, he would continue, giving Josef a sly glance, lightning does strike twice.

Josef was not among the gathered guests. My little brother was shy of strangers, so he was likely hiding at the Goblin Grove, practicing until his fingers bled. My heart ached to join him, even as my fingertips twinged with sympathetic pain.

“Good, I won’t be missed,” K?the said cheerfully. My sister often found any excuse to skip out on her chores. “Let’s go.”

Outside, the air was brisk. The day was uncommonly cold, even for late autumn. The light was sparse, weak and wavering, as though seen through curtains or a veil. A faint mist wrapped the trees along the path into town, wraithing their spindly branches into spectral limbs. The last night of the year. On a day like this, I could believe the barriers between worlds were thin indeed.

The path that led into town was pitted and rutted with carriage tracks and spotted with horse dung. K?the and I took care to keep to the edges, where the short, dead grass helped prevent the damp from seeping into our boots.

“Ugh.” K?the stepped around another dung puddle. “I wish we could afford a carriage.”

“If only our wishes had power,” I said.

“Then I’d be the most powerful person in the world,” K?the remarked, “for I have wishes aplenty. I wish we were rich. I wish we could afford whatever we wanted. Just imagine, Liesl: what if, what if, what if.”

I smiled. As little girls, K?the and I were fond of What if games. While my sister’s imagination did not encompass the uncanny, as mine and Josef’s did, she had an extraordinary capacity for pretend nonetheless.

“What if, indeed?” I asked softly.

“Let’s play,” she said. “The Ideal Imaginary World. You first, Liesl.”

“All right.” I thought of Hans, then pushed him aside. “Josef would be a famous musician.”

K?the made a face. “It’s always about Josef with you. Don’t you have any dreams of your own?”

I did. They were locked up in a box, safe and sound beneath the bed we shared, never to be seen, never to be heard.

“Fine,” I said. “You go, then, K?the. Your Ideal Imaginary World.”

She laughed, a bright, bell-like sound, the only musical thing about my sister. “I am a princess.”

“Naturally.”

K?the shot me a look. “I am a princess, and you are a queen. Happy now?”

I waved her on.

“I am a princess,” she continued. “Papa is the Prince-Bishop’s Kapellmeister, and we all live in Salzburg.”

K?the and I had been born in Salzburg, when Papa was still a court musician and Mother a singer in a troupe, before poverty chased us to the backwoods of Bavaria.

“Mother is the toast of the city for her beauty and her voice, and Josef is Master Antonius’s prize pupil.”

“Studying in Salzburg?” I asked. “Not Vienna?”

“In Vienna, then,” K?the amended. “Oh yes, Vienna.” Her blue eyes sparkled as she spun out her fantasy for us. “We would travel to visit him, of course. Perhaps we’ll see him perform in the great cities of Paris, Mannheim, and Munich, maybe even London! We shall have a grand house in each city, trimmed with gold and marble and mahogany wood. We’ll wear gowns made in the most luxurious silks and brocades, a different color for every day of the week. Invitations to the fanciest balls and parties and operas and plays shall flood our post every morning, and a bevy of swains will storm the barricades for our favor. The greatest artists and musicians would consider us their intimate acquaintances, and we would dance and feast all night long on cake and pie and schnitzel and—”