Wintersong(74)

Twig and Thistle suggested a picnic down by the shores of the Underground lake. We watched the Lorelei emerge and disappear beneath the surface as a group of changelings played on the far side. Unbidden, the memory of Josef’s face with goblin eyes returned to me. I frowned.

“What are the changelings?” I asked.

Thistle gave me a sharp look. “Why do you ask, mortal?”

I could have punished her for not addressing me properly—I was Her Highness—but Thistle, like Constanze, called me whatever she wanted.

“I’m just curious,” I said. “Are they—are they children? Of the Goblin King?”

Twig and Thistle laughed, their high-pitched cackles splintering and echoing on the shores of the Underground lake.

“Children?” Thistle sneered. “No. No union of mortal and Der Erlk?nig has ever been fruitful.”

“Actually—” Twig began, but the other goblin girl cut her off.

“The changelings are nothing, poor fools,” Thistle said. “Neither fish nor fowl, human nor goblin.”

“How can that be?” I watched the changelings on the far side skipping rocks, sending luminescent ripples across the surface. In the shifting, mercurial light of the grotto, they seemed more like a ragtag bunch of children than the elegant creatures with whom I had danced at the Goblin Ball. There was an innocence as well as an agelessness about them. They could have been fifteen. They could have been five hundred. “If they aren’t the children of humans and goblins, then what are they?”

“They are,” Twig said quietly, “the product of a wish.”

Silence louder than a bell gong rang throughout the grotto. Thistle gave Twig a dark look.

“A wish?” An image returned to me, half-remembered and mostly forgotten: the sound of my baby brother’s crying in the room down the hall, a plea to save his life.

One of the changelings, a comely young female, sidled toward me.

“What did we tell you before, Your Highness?” Twig said. “Whatever the old laws giveth, they also taketh.”

I nodded.

“Say you are a young girl,” Twig began. “And the black death is sweeping through the world above, taking with it every man, woman, and child it comes across. You watch your father sicken and die, you watch your mother swell up and bloat, you watch your little brother grow thin and fade away into a wisp. You bury them all, one by one, into the frozen ground and wonder where they have gone. To Heaven? Or someplace worse? So you make a wish—a wish, not a prayer—that you will never suffer their fate. That you can hide where not even the hand of Death can find you.”

The changeling near me reached out her hand and I took it. She was a sickly little thing, with pointed ears and teeth.

“Careful,” Thistle said. “They bite.”

At my touch, the changeling’s entire countenance brightened; the paleness of her cheek no longer pallid, the painful thinness of her body a languid slenderness. The pinched expression on her face smoothed into one of hunger. The changeling breathed deep, and the world around me grew just a little bit darker. I snatched back my hand. Thistle snickered.

“Say also,” Twig continued, “you are a young man. You are the younger of a beautiful pair of siblings renowned throughout the village for your beauty. Your mother was a beauty in the generation ahead of you, but time has not been as kind to her. She dresses in fashions much younger than are appropriate, cakes her face in powder and rouge. Your older sister is happily married to a wonderful man, until one day, she is stricken with smallpox, leaving her face scarred and her beauty marred forever. So you stare into the mirror and make a wish: to remain young and beautiful for all time.”

“How sad,” I murmured. Trapped and tormented by your own wishes. I knew intimately how that felt; I was often strangled by the tyranny of my desires.

“Oh, you of the tender heart,” Thistle sneered. “Don’t waste your pity on them; they brought it on themselves, as all you mortals do.”

“Can they walk the world above?”

“No,” said Twig.

“Then how…” The rest of the question died in my throat, choking on my brother’s name.

Thistle sniggered, but Twig stared at me with her blank, black eyes. I could read nothing in them, but she heard the unspoken question on my tongue. “The wishes they made were selfish,” she said simply. “Yours was selfless.”

I did not want to dwell on this uncomfortable thought further. A restlessness overcame me and I rose to my feet. “Let’s go.”

“Go where, Your Highness?” Twig asked.

“Somewhere,” I muttered. “Anywhere.”

I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Boredom and futility pressed on me, and I wanted to rip, shred, tear, scream. But the scream was bottled within me, and I could not let it out. I could not let it out. I could not let it out.

“Mmmm.” I recoiled when I noticed Thistle’s face hovering over my shoulder. She had climbed up the stone wall of the grotto and was poised over me, breathing deeply as though inhaling the scent of some delicious perfume. “Such strong emotions,” she purred. “Such fire. It’s so warm.”

“Get away from me.” I shoved her away, and she tumbled down the rock wall to Twig’s crackling laughter.

Twig’s laugh caught the attention of the changelings, who left off their rock-skipping games and slid toward me, silent and smooth. They had the form and feature of young men and women, but they moved with a sinuous grace that was not of the world above.