Wintersong(62)

The ground was unsteady beneath my feet. The room spun, and I was falling. The Goblin King rushed forward to hold me up.

“Twig, Thistle!” My goblin attendants appeared in an instant. “Take my bride back to her chambers and make sure she is well rested.”

“No.” I threw up a hand. I drew myself up to my fullest height and tried to muster a little dignity. “I can see myself out, mein Herr.”

I stumbled away from him, but long fingers twined themselves in my hair, forcing my head back and into the Goblin King’s embrace.

“I do want you,” he whispered in my ear. “But I want the part of you that you will not give me. This”—and he ran his hand down the column of my exposed throat, my chest, my waist—“this is only part of you. When I said I wanted you entire, I meant it.”

“What part of me have I not given you?”

He smiled into my hair.

“You know what it is, Elisabeth.” He hummed a bit of a melody.

My music.

I wrenched myself from his grasp and shoved him away. I wished for a door to appear. Then I wrenched the handle open and slammed it shut, its loud, satisfying clang the last word in our conversation.

*

My bravado lasted only as long as the walk to my own chambers. The paths in the Underground rearranged themselves so I found myself in the corridor outside my room. I unlocked the door and threw myself inside, eager to outpace the howls of rage and disappointment that dogged my heels.

I could not breathe. The burn of tears scalded my lower lashes, but none came. I wanted to scream, I wanted to tear my room to shreds. I wanted to destroy something. I wanted to destroy him.

I grasped the Louis Quinze set by my hearth and hurled it against the earthen walls with all my might. The table and chairs, delicate as they seemed, were sturdier than they looked and merely bounced off. I did scream then, and picked up one of the chairs by its legs before smashing it against the gleaming travertine of the fireplace. It was a few blows before the chair splintered, sending chips and shards of the white stone with it. I threw what was left of the ruined chair into the fire. The table and the other chair soon followed.

Then the other objects in my room. The candelabras, the console tables, the beautiful and ugly objets d’art. I picked up the statuette of the leering satyr and orgiastic nymph and threw it as hard as I could against the solid wood of my door. Made of porcelain, it shattered immediately.

I screamed and raged and kicked and shrieked and cried and destroyed until my anger and frustration were spent. I lay on the floor and debris of my bedroom, my breath coming in short gasps.

My wedding dress choked me. I made a feeble attempt to rip the fine silk off me, but could not muster enough hatred for strength. I was empty. After a whirlwind evening of hopes and disappointment, the emptiness was blessedly comforting. I listened to the crackle of the fire, searching for patterns in the sound. For music. For structure. For sense.

A handful of notes came to me, a short rise, a rushed fall. The motion of a hand reaching out, only to fall uselessly by my side. It repeated over and over, faster and faster, until the storm of sixteenth notes rushing out of me crashed into a jangling chord. I had never written something like this before. It wasn’t pretty; it was messy, discordant, ugly, and it perfectly suited my mood.

Paper. I ought to write it down. But I had destroyed everything in my room. A laugh escaped me. Tripping myself up at every turn. How like me.

I glanced at the mostly white expanse of my wedding gown, unsullied and untorn, save for a splash of wine and dirt here and there. I reached for a large splinter near me and charred the end in the fire before cooling it quickly with breath and fingers.

Then I used the ash to write.

*

An incomplete musical phrase wormed its way into my sleep, begging me to finish it. But I could not grasp its shape. I did not know how to resolve the questions it posed. The phrase seemed familiar, like a half-whistled tune from my childhood, but I could not place where I had heard it before.

I startled myself awake. The fire in the hearth had died down to embers, and I was cold and naked on my debris-strewn floor. My wedding gown hung from my bedpost, the white silk covered with ashen scribbles—remnants of my moody masterpiece. I ran my grubby hands down its silken length. So fragile. So temporary. One smudge of my dirty fingertips could erase hours of work. I teased my fingers along the edges of my notes, the temptation to destroy even this rising strong within me. I swallowed it down.

The silk gown rustled gently. There was a draft in my barrow room. Shivering, I rose to my feet in search of that spectral breeze when I stumbled across a threshold.

I blinked. My barrow room had been sealed, shut, and locked with a key. The door was still there, but next to the hearth was an arch that had not been there before. The breeze came from the space beyond the threshold.

I glanced over my shoulder. Evidence of my fury and frustration was still scattered over the floor. This was my room. That was my bed. That was my wedding gown, still hanging from its post. Not wanting to put the dress back on, I wished for a dressing gown. I found one on my bed, rumpled and wrinkled as though it had been tossed rather than magicked there. I put it on, and stepped into the darkness.

Fairy lights winked into existence the moment I crossed into this new room, fluttering slowly, as though they struggled to wake. Their soft glow illuminated another set of rooms, larger and grander than my barrow bedchamber, yet somehow still small and intimate in scale. Standing in the center was a klavier.