Wintersong(40)

“Mortal, you know nothing about the power of wishes,” Thistle said. “What the old laws giveth, they taketh in return.”

I thought of the careless wishes I had thrown around, and a whisper of foreboding touched me.

“All must be in balance,” Twig explained. “Ever since we were sundered from the world above and driven Underground, we were granted the power to travel as we wished. But nothing comes for free, mistress, and we built this kingdom with our own hands. Now, you must excuse us, mistress,” she said. “We have other duties to which we must attend.” She pointed above our heads. “The fairy lights will guide you to your sister.”

I looked up at the ceiling. A shower of bright motes began to fall about me like snow, resting lightly on my shoulders and hair. I laughed; magic or no, it was enchanting. It tickled. The fairy lights spun about me before resolving into a golden stream of light. I followed the path down the hall and into another corridor.

K?the’s barrow room was on the other side of the great hall. The corridor leading to her room looked very much like mine, but the human touch on this side of the Underground was stronger. The paintings hung on the walls were similar to what we might see in the gallery of a great estate: portraits and pastoral scenes, all showing the Goblin King.

At first I was inclined to dismiss them as yet another self-aggrandizing display of Der Erlk?nig, but as I walked farther down the timeline of portraits, I noticed something curious. The fashions and artistic hand changed and shifted through the centuries—as to be expected—but so too did the sitter.

I did not notice the changing faces at first, for each successive portrait showed kinship with its predecessor. Yet there were subtle differences between them all that one could not simply attribute to differing artists. They all shared similar features—the long, elfin face, high cheekbones, preternatural and relentless symmetry—but the slope of the jaw, the set of the eyes, as well as the colors of the irises, were each as distinct as a snowflake in a storm. They were all different men, and yet, at the same time, they were all Der Erlk?nig.

Brown eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, gray eyes, but none were the mismatched wolf’s eyes of my Goblin King. I walked up and down the gallery, studying each face, looking for the pair I knew.

At last I came across a portrait at the very end of the corridor, unlit, secluded, and shadowed, as though hiding in shame. It was the most recent in the long line, painted in the style of the old Dutch masters: light and dark in exaggerated contrasts, the details sharp and painstakingly realistic. Its sitter was a young man, dressed in velvet academic robes and a round cap with a tassel. Despite the richness of the material, there was something austere about him, especially as he had one hand clasped around a wooden cross hanging from a cord on his neck. In the other hand, he held a violin upright in his lap, his long, beautiful fingers resting along the neck. I squinted. The scroll of the instrument looked familiar, but its edges faded into shadow, and I could make nothing of it but the vague impression of a woman’s face contorted in agony. Or ecstasy.

I shivered.

I could not bring myself to meet the sitter’s gaze until the very end. I thought I knew what I would find—two differently colored eyes, one green, one gray—but what I saw arrested me.

It was a younger Goblin King in the portrait, his cheeks fuller and not so sharp, his features less defined. A young man my age. A youth. The difference in color in those eyes was in stark relief in the portrait: the left, the bright green of spring grass, and the right, the blue-gray of a twilight sky. Yet I recalled them being the muted hazel-green of dying moss and the icy gray of a winter’s pond. Faded. Old.

Presently the fairy lights tugged at my hair and at my clothing until I moved on. The image of the Goblin King’s younger self stayed with me as I walked away. The expression in his eyes made my breath come short. Unguarded. Vulnerable. Human. I recognized those eyes from my childhood, in the soft-eyed young man I’d stumbled across in the Goblin King’s bedchamber. I saw that expression when my Goblin King looked at me now.

I was all shaken up, my emotions upturned and in disarray. I continued walking down the corridor, suddenly eager to put as much distance between the portrait and me as I could.

It wasn’t until the portrait gallery was far behind me when a disconcerting thought came to me:

When had he become my Goblin King?

*

“Liesl!” K?the enthusiastically greeted me when I appeared in her room. Like mine, her barrow chamber had no door, but one had appeared when I wished it.

Her changed appearance was shocking. My sister had always been full-figured and plump, her cheeks cherubic, her arms full and healthy. Now she was thin, gaunt, and sickly. She wore a dressing gown over her chemise, but it hung off her shoulders, as though the body within it was nothing. K?the was disappearing before my eyes.

“Come sit by the fire and take tea with me,” my sister urged. She seemed at home in the Underground, playing hostess in her suite of packed-dirt rooms.

“K?the,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m fine.” A tea set had already been laid out on the table by the hearth, and she gestured to the chair and bade me sit. Then she poured me a cup of tea and offered me a slice of cake. “How are you, my dear?”

I accepted the slice of cake. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know at all.”