Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(23)

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

She began pacing back and forth before the fire. “Ever since you came back from—from where you’d been, you’ve been barely holding yourself together.” Before I could protest in my defense, she went on. “You’re hot, you’re cold, you’re up, you’re down, you’re fast, you’re slow. I can’t keep up with you sometimes, Liesl. You’re like a top spinning out of control, and I’m continually watching—waiting—for any wobble that might topple you.”

I was stunned. Was I so changed by my time beneath the earth? I was a different Liesl—no, Elisabeth—than I had been before I entered the realm of the goblins, but I was still the same me. Still the same soul. Still self-indulgent, selfish, selfless, savage. I had shed my skin to emerge anew, more me than before. But had I always been this insufferable? Had I always been so tiresome?

“I—I—” Words withered on my tongue. “I didn’t mean—I’m so sorry, K?the.”

Her expression softened, but I could see that even my apology wearied her. She sighed. “Don’t apologize, Liesl,” she said. “Do. Stop wallowing and go find closure. Absolution or resolution or whatever it is, I am tired of holding your heart. Give it back to the Goblin Grove if you must. I can no longer carry it.”

My eyes burned. I could feel K?the’s pitying glance, but did not look at her. A hot tear slipped from beneath my lashes, and I tried very hard not to sniff. Stop wallowing, she had said. It was hard.

My sister leaned over and pressed a kiss to my brow. “Go to the Goblin Grove,” she said. “Go, and make peace.”

I went.


*

The night was clear as I made my way into the heart of the wood.

It had rained earlier that day, and a few clouds lingered, but the bright, full face of the moon shone down on me, touching the forest with silver frost. But I would have been able to find my way to the Goblin Grove even if the night had been as black as pitch. The woods and the legends surrounding it were etched into my bones, a map of my soul.

The walk was both longer and shorter than I remembered. The distance from grove to inn seemed to have shortened, but the time it took to reach it seemed to have grown. I came upon the Goblin Grove almost by surprise, the circular ring of twelve alder trees jumping out of the shadows like children playing peekaboo. I hesitated on the edges of the grove. The last time I stood here, I had crossed the barrier between worlds. The Goblin Grove was one of the few places left where the Underground and the world above existed together, a sacred space made holy by the old laws and my memories. I stood on the edge, waiting for a sense of trespass to overcome me as I crossed from one world back to the next.

It did not come.

I entered and sat down with my back against a tree, wrapping my cloak tighter about me.

“Ah, mein Herr,” I said softly to the night. “I am here. I am here at last.”

There was no answer. Even the forest was unwontedly quiet, without its usual sense of patient waiting. I felt awkward sitting here in the dark, like a child who had left home, only to return to find it not as they remembered. The grove was like and not like how I remembered it, but it wasn’t the minute and minuscule failings of memory that made it different; it was the emptiness.

I was alone.

For a moment, I considered going back, returning to the inn where it was warm, where it was bright, where it was safe. But I had promised my sister I would make peace, even if I did not know how. Even if there was no one to hear me.

“I am leaving for Vienna on the morrow,” I said. “I am leaving the Goblin Grove behind.”

I couldn’t help but pause to wait for a reply, even though I knew not to expect it. I wasn’t talking to myself; I was having a conversation, even if I was the only one participating.

“I should be happy. I am happy. I have always wanted to go to Vienna. I have always wanted to see the world beyond our little corner of Bavaria.”

It was getting easier now to speak as though to an audience and not myself. I wondered then if I wanted the Goblin King to respond, or if I merely wanted to leave my heart here before him, before the old laws.

“Is it not what you taught me, mein Herr? To love myself first instead of last?” My words hung before me in a cloud of mist. My wistfulness turned breath, my longing made visible. I was growing colder by the minute, the damp chill seeping through my cloak and into my bones. “Are you not happy for me?”

Again, no response. His absence was nearly a presence, a noticeable, unavoidable void. I wanted to close that void, to seal that abyss, and heal the fractures in my heart.

“I know what you would say,” I said. “Go forth and live, Elisabeth. Live and forget about me.” I heard his voice in my memory, a soft, expressive baritone as rich and warm as a bassoon. Or was it a powerful tenor, as sharp and clear as a clarionet? Time had blurred the details and edges of the Goblin King, turning him from a man back into a myth, no matter how hard I had tried to hold on. To remember.

“Forgetting is easy,” I whispered to the empty air. “Easier than I thought. Easier than I want to admit. Even now the exact colors of your eyes are no longer clear to me, mein Herr.”

I ran my fingers over the still-frozen ground. “But living?” There was nothing beneath my feet or fingers. No sense of thaw, no sleeping green waiting to burst forth. Dead, hollow, lifeless. “Living is hard. You didn’t tell me it would be so hard, mein Herr. You didn’t say a word.”