Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(2)

Composer of Der Erlk?nig





To Franz Josef Johannes Gottlieb Vogler care of Master Antonius

Paris

Mein liebes Brüderchen,

Another death, another funeral, another wake. Frau Berchtold was found dead in her bed last week with frost about her lips and a silvery scar across her throat. Do you remember Frau Berchtold, Sepp? She used to scold us for corrupting the good, God-fearing children of the village with our terrifying tales of the Underground.

And now she is gone.

She was the third this month to pass in such a manner. We all grow fearful of the plague, but if it is plague, then it is like no pestilence we have ever known before. No pox, no bruises, no sign of the disease, none that we can see. The dead appear unharmed, untouched, save for the silver kisses about their mouth and neck. There is no rhyme or reason to their passing; they are old and young, male and female, healthy and infirm, sound and unsound altogether.

Is this why you do not write? Are you healthy, hale, whole? Are you even alive? Or will the next letter with your name upon it contain nothing but heartbreak and another funeral to arrange?

The elders of the town mutter dire portents under their breaths. “Elf-struck,” they say. “Goblin-marked. The devil’s handiwork. Mark our words: we are headed for trouble soon.”

Goblin-marked. Silver on the throat. Frost on the lips. I do not know what this betokens. I once believed that love was enough to keep the world turning. Enough to overcome the old laws. But I have witnessed the slow unraveling of reason and order in our boring, backward little village, the rejection of enlightened thought and a return to forgotten ways. Salt on every threshold, every entrance. Even the old rector has warded the steps of our church against evil, unbroken white lines that nevertheless blur the boundaries between what is sacred and what is superstition.

Constanze is no help. She isn’t much for conversation these days, not that our grandmother ever was. But in truth, she worries me. Constanze emerges from her quarters but seldom nowadays, and when she does, we are never certain which version of our grandmother we will meet. Sometimes she is present, sharp-eyed and as irascible as ever, but at others, she seems to be living in another year, another era altogether.

K?the and I dutifully leave her a tray of food on the landing outside her room every evening, but every morning it remains untouched. A few bites may be taken of the bread and cheese, drops of milk scattered on the floor like fairy footsteps, but Constanze seems to take no sustenance beyond fear and her faith in Der Erlk?nig.

Belief is not enough to live on.

There is madness in her bloodline, Mother would say. Mania and melancholy.

Madness.

Mother would say that our father drank to chase away his demons, to dull the maelstrom inside. His grandfather, Constanze’s father, drowned in it. Papa drowned in drink first. I hadn’t understood until I had demons of my own.

Sometimes, I fear there is a maelstrom swirling within me. Madness, mania, melancholy. Music, magic, memories. A vortex, spinning around a truth I do not want to admit. I do not sleep, for I fear the signs and wonders I see when I wake. Thorny vines wound round twigs, the clack of invisible black claws, blood blooming into the petals of a flower.

I wish you were here. You always could straighten my wandering, rambling thoughts and prune my wild imaginings into a beautiful garden. There is a shadow on my soul, Sepperl. It is not just the dead who are goblin-marked.

Help me, Sepp. Help me make sense of myself.

Yours always,

Composer of Der Erlk?nig





To Franz Josef Johannes Gottlieb Vogler care of Master Antonius

Paris

Beloved,

The seasons turn, and still no word from you. Winter is gone, but the thaw is slow to come. The trees shiver in the wind, their branches still bare of any new growth. The air no longer smells of ice and slumber, but neither does the breeze bring with it any scent of damp and green.

I have not stepped foot in the Goblin Grove since summer and the klavier in your room has lain untouched since Papa died.

I don’t know what to tell you, mein Brüderchen. I have broken my promises to you twice over. The first by being unreachable, the second by failing to write. Not words, but melodies. Harmonies. Chords. The Wedding Night Sonata is unfinished, the last movement still unwritten. When the sun is high and the world is bright, I can find a myriad excuses for not composing in dusty corners, in accounting ledgers, in stores of flour, yeast, sugar, and butter, in the quotidian minutiae of running an inn.

But the answer is different in the dark. Between dusk and dawn, the hours when kobolds and H?dekin make mischief in the woods, there is only one reason.

The Goblin King.

I have not been honest with you, Sepp. I have not told you the whole story, thinking I would do so in person. This is not a story I thought I could commit to words, for words are insufficient. But I shall try anyway.

Once there was a little girl, who played her music for a little boy in the wood. She was an innkeeper’s daughter and he was the Lord of Mischief, but neither were wholly what they seemed, for nothing is as simple as a fairy tale.

For the span of one year, I was the Goblin King’s bride.

That is not a fairy tale, mein Brüderchen, but the unvarnished truth. Two winters ago, Der Erlk?nig stole our sister away, and I journeyed Underground to find her.

I found myself instead.

K?the knows. K?the knows better than anyone just what it was like to be buried in the realm of the goblins. But our sister doesn’t understand what you would: that I wasn’t trapped in a prison of Der Erlk?nig’s making, but became Goblin Queen of my own free will. She does not know that the monster who abducted her is the monster I claim. She thought I escaped the Goblin King’s clutches. She does not know he let me go.