Wintersong(82)

We had been working on the piece for hours, my husband and I. Every time he played it, I heard and understood something different within the movement. Within me. A piece begun in rage and impotence, transformed into inexorable longing, and yet, not a piece without joy.

I had marked its tempo as allegro.

To be played quickly. Swiftly.

Joyfully.

“Again?” the Goblin King asked. “Have you not had enough music, my dear?”

He was tired. I could hear fear in his playing, fear and fatigue. I had worn him down. I had worn myself down. But I did not care; I did not want to stop. The cage about my heart had been opened and I was flying. I was free for the first time in my life, and my soul soared. I could not play, could not compose, could not think fast enough; my mind outpaced my fingers, and the errors and wrong notes that ensued caused me as much laughter as tears. More, I wanted more, I needed more. If Lucifer’s sin was pride, then mine was covetousness. More and more and more. It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

“No,” I said. “Never.”

“Slow down, Elisabeth,” he laughed. “I doubt even God Himself could keep up with you.”

“Let Him try.” The blood fizzed in my veins. “I shall outpace even His angels in a footrace!”

“Darling, darling.” The Goblin King lowered his arms to let them rest. “Let it be. The first movement is magnificent.”

I smiled. It was magnificent. I was magnificent. No, I was more than magnificent; I was invincible.

“It is,” I said. “And it could be even greater.” My hands trembled, fingers twitching. I was nervy, excitable, a hound before the chase. Once more, just once more …

The Goblin King saw me shaking and frowned. I snatched my hands from the keyboard and hid them in my skirts.

“Elisabeth, enough.”

“But there is still so much work to do,” I protested. “The theme is sound but the middle passages are—oh!”

A drop of blood fell on the ivory keys. Puzzled, I wiped it away, when another drop fell on my hand. Then another. And another. The Goblin King rushed forward and pressed a kerchief to my nose. Red stained the snow-white linen, blooming across the fabric at an alarming rate. Suddenly, the world wound down and time slowed to a halt. My thoughts, a fleet-footed hart running through the woods of my mind, stumbled and fell.

Blood?

“Rest.” The word was as much a command as a caress. The Goblin King clapped his hands, and Twig and Thistle appeared, one holding a glass tumbler, the other a bottle of a rich amber liquor. He poured me a drink and handed it to me without another word.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Brandy.”

“What for?”

“Just drink it.”

I wrinkled my nose, but took a sip, feeling the burn of the liquor slide down my throat and warm my heart. He watched me carefully as I finished the drink.

“There,” he said. “Feel better?”

I blinked. To my surprise, I did. My hands, which had shaken and twitched with years of pent-up frustration, were finally still. I reached up to touch my face. My nosebleed had stopped, and so had the torrent of song that had flooded from me in the past few days.

“Now.” The Goblin King took away the glass and sat beside me on the bench. “We’ve been playing your music for a long time. Let us pass the time in other ways.”

He took my face in his hands and leaned in close, concern in those remarkable eyes. The tenderness there undid me, and a fire of an entirely different sort blossomed within me. The Goblin King gently stroked my cheek and I closed my eyes to breathe him in.

“Have you any suggestions, mein Herr?”

His lips brushed against my ear. “I have a few ideas.”

I was wound tighter than a violin string, pitched too sharp, and I urged his rough, callused fingertips lower, loosening me, tuning me to the right key.

“We could put down the quill and the bow, and play each other instead,” I murmured.

The Goblin King paused and drew back. I opened my eyes to meet his gaze, but instead of desire, I saw something else: worry.

The longer you burn the candle …

Suddenly, the bloodstained handkerchief seemed like an omen.

But I pushed the foreboding away. I was happy. I was fulfilled. I had music at my fingertips and a willing performer at my beck and call. The Goblin King was a consummate player of violins and of women, and the skill with which he plied both was extraordinary. My arms, my breasts, my stomach, my thighs; he could wring such exquisite emotion from me with just the softest flick of his tongue, the merest touch of his lips. I was in the hands of a virtuoso.

So I kissed him, kissed him with ardor and heat, burning away his worry and my doubt. I felt his concern warm into something altogether more pleasurable beneath my lips, and I traced my hands down his arms, drawing him close.

I let the Goblin King play me the rest of the evening, the sonata, the bloodstained handkerchief, and the candle forgotten for the time being. He was the bow, I the strings, and his fingers brushed my body to make me sing.

*

The Goblin King was gone when I awoke. At some point during the night he had put me to bed, but had not joined me there. Where my husband went in his private hours, I did not know, but I thought I could hear the distant, dreamy sound of his violin.

The mirror above my mantel showed the Goblin Grove bathed in an eerie half-light, either dawn or dusk, I could not tell. The alders were in full bloom in the world above, awakened to spring before the rest of the forest. I smiled and rose from my bed.