Wintersong(7)

The stranger stepped closer. In his gloved hands he held a flute, beautifully carved and polished to a high shine. Up close, I could see the gleam of his eyes from beneath the hood.

“No? Well, then, if you won’t buy my wares, would you accept a gift?”

“A—a gift?” I was hot and uncomfortable beneath his scrutiny. He looked at me as no one had before, as though I were more than the sum of my eyes, my nose, my lips, my hair, and my wretched plainness. He looked as though he saw me entire, as though he knew me. But did I know him? His presence scratched at my mind, like a half-remembered song. “What for?”

“Do I need a reason?” His voice was neither deep nor high, but there was a quality to it that spoke of dark woods and dry winter nights. “Perhaps I just wanted to make a young woman’s day a little bit brighter. The nights grow long and cold, after all.”

“Oh no, sir,” I said again. “My grandmother warned me against the wolves that prowl in the woods.”

The stranger laughed, and I caught a glimpse of sharp, white teeth. I shivered.

“Your grandmother is wise,” he said. “I’m sure she also told you to avoid the goblin men. Or perhaps she told you we were one and the same.”

I did not answer.

“You are clever. I do not offer this gift to you out of the goodness of my heart, but out of a selfish need to see what you might do with it.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is music in your soul. A wild and untamed sort of music that speaks to me. It defies all the rules and laws you humans set upon it. It grows from inside you, and I have a wish to set that music free.”

He had heard me sing with the fruit-sellers. A wild, untamed sort of music. I’d heard those words before, from Papa. Then, it had seemed like an insult. My musical education had been rudimentary at best; of us all, Papa had taken the most time and care with Josef, making sure my brother understood the theory and history of music, its building blocks and foundations. I had always listened in on the edges of those lessons, taking whatever notes I could, applying them slipshod to my own compositions.

But this elegant stranger cast no judgment on my lack of formal structure, my lack of learning. I took his words and planted them deep inside.

“For you, Elisabeth.” He offered me the flute again. This time I took it. Despite the cold air, the instrument was warm, and felt almost like skin beneath my hands.

It was only after the stranger disappeared that I realized he had called me by my given name.

Elisabeth.

How could he have possibly known?

*

I held the flute in my hands, admiring its build, running my fingers over its rich grain and smooth finish. A persistent thought niggled at the back of my mind, a sense I had lost or forgotten something, but it hovered on the edges of memory, a word on the tip of my tongue.

K?the.

A jolt of fear stirred my sluggish thoughts. K?the, where was K?the? In the milling crowd, there was no sign of my sister’s ridiculous confectionary hat, nor an echo of her chiming laugh. A deep sense of dread overcame me, along with the troubling feeling that I had been tricked.

Why had that tall, elegant stranger offered me a gift? Was it truly out of selfish curiosity for my sake, or just another ploy to distract me while the goblin men stole my sister away?

I thrust the flute into my satchel and picked up the hems of my skirts, ignoring the scandalized glances of the town fussbudgets and the hooting calls of village ne’er-do-wells. I ran through the market in a blind panic, calling K?the’s name.

Reason warred with faith. I was too old to indulge in the stories of my childhood, but I could not deny the strangeness of my encounter with the fruit-sellers. With the tall, elegant stranger.

They were the goblin men.

There were no goblin men.

Come buy, come buy!

The spectral voices of the merchants were faint and thin on the breeze, more memory than sound. I followed that thread of music, hearing its eerie melodies not with my ears, but with another part of me, unseen and unnoticed. The music reached into my heart and tugged, pulling me along like a puppet on its strings.

I knew where my sister had gone. Terror seized me, along with the unquestioned certainty that something bad will happen if I did not reach her in time. I had promised to keep my sister safe.

Come buy, come buy!

The voices were softer now, distant and hollow, fading into silence with a ghostly whisper. I reached the edges of the market, but the fruit-sellers were no longer there. There were no stalls, no tables, no tents, no fruit, nothing to suggest they had ever been there. Nothing save K?the’s lonely form in the mist, her flimsy dress fluttering about her like one of the White Ladies of Frau Perchta, like a figure from one of Constanze’s fairy tales. Perhaps I had reached my sister in time. Perhaps there was nothing to fear.

“K?the!” I cried, running to embrace her.

She turned around. My sister’s lips glistened—red, sticky, and sweet—her pout swollen as though she had just been thoroughly kissed.

In her hands was a half-eaten peach, its juice dripping down her fingers like rivulets of blood.





SHE IS FOR THE GOBLIN KING NOW

K?the did not speak to me on our walk home. I was nursing a foul mood myself: my irritation with my sister, the unsettling encounter with the fruit-sellers, the shivery longing the tall, elegant stranger had stirred in me—all swirled together into a maelstrom of confusion. A misty quality shrouded my memories of the market, and I could not be certain if it hadn’t all been a dream.