Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(28)

Printed on weighted card stock in Gothic black letter were the words BLACK & WHITE CARNIVAL.

And then, in that flowing, flawless hand:

Mlle Elisabeth Vogler is requested to attend the BALL at Procházka House, on the night of Shrove Tuesday, at FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE EVE NING.

An invitation. Four of them, each addressed to a different person. Me. Mssr Fran?ois Saint-Georges. Mlle Katharina Vogler. My heart clenched. Mssr Josef Vogler.

“Well?” K?the bit off her thread and tied a knot. “Don’t keep us waiting, Liesl.”

“You were right, K?the,” I said softly. I handed her the invitation with her name. “We’ve been invited to one of Count Procházka’s infamous balls.”

My sister squealed in excitement. “I knew it!” She tossed aside the gown on which she had been working. “Take that, Frau Drucker,” she gloated to the crumpled silk. “I am personally acquainted with Count Procházka!”

I gave Fran?ois his invitation. He met my gaze. “Josef?” he asked.

I closed my eyes. “I don’t know,” I said in a small voice. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know if he would want to come.”

Fran?ois sighed, and in the depths of his sigh, I heard what he did not say. I don’t know what Josef wants these days.

I didn’t either. Not anymore. I wasn’t sure if I ever had. I opened my eyes. The rooms were small, cramped, crowded, but I felt my brother’s absence from this scene as acutely as a missing tooth. He should have been here. He should have been with us, part of the new family we were building here. An irrational surge of anger and irritation spiked my blood. Josef should at least try to make a new life. I was trying. Fran?ois was trying. K?the was trying and seemed to have nearly succeeded. Even if my brother and I were both struggling to take root in Vienna, we used to struggle together when we were children. Now we were alone. Isolated.

“The Count could have invited us sooner,” K?the grumbled. “We’ll have no time to make our own costumes.” She was already furiously sketching her ideas for our fancy dress onto a spare bit of foolscap. An old draft of the Wedding Night Sonata that I had discarded in a fit of frustration and fury. I waited for the sharp stab of jealousy or resentment to see my sister turn my failure into a new work of art, but there was nothing. Only a sense of emptiness.

“What of your work for Monsieur Schneider?” Fran?ois asked K?the.

She turned an imperious blue gaze on each of us in turn. “I fully expect the two of you to pull your weight around here,” she said primly. “And leave me to my genius.”

I would have laughed if I didn’t feel so bereft of my own creative spark. “Yes, ma’am.” I gathered the discarded gowns and moved them to the table in the next room where Fran?ois joined me, resigned to another long night by the candle.

“And if Josef comes back,” she called after us, “tell him he’s not exempt!”

Fran?ois and I exchanged another glance. Not when Josef came back.

If.





FAULTLINES


the third candle was halfway gone when Josef finally returned.

I had sent Fran?ois to bed a candle and a half ago and moved my work to the front room. All those hours of mending and sewing I had neglected in favor of music had come back to haunt me, for although my fingers were nimble enough on a keyboard or strings, they were hopeless with a needle and thread. But while I was determined to help my sister in any way I could, I had been even more determined to confront my brother the moment he came home.

“Where have you been?” I kept my voice low, so as not to disturb Fran?ois. K?the and I shared the other room while the boys slept in the front.

Josef paused in unlacing his boots. “Nowhere,” he said. His tone was expressionless, but it was a calculated sort of neutral that spoke volumes.

Although the light of the candle did not reach far, I thought I could see the dark tracks of mud on the soles of his shoes and at the hem of his greatcoat. “Liar,” I said calmly, keeping my head bent over my needlework. “You’ve been to the cemetery again, I see.”

My brother stiffened. “Yes,” he said. “It is the only place in this godforsaken city where I can breathe.”

St. Marx Cemetery was some two and a half miles from the outer city walls. It was also the only bit of wildness within any easy distance, with stretches of open space and trees and grass and nary another person in sight but the dead underfoot.

“I know,” I said quietly.

And I did. No matter where you turned, you were never more than a half step away from your neighbor and your neighbor’s business. Horses, pedestrians, and gutter refuse lined the streets, alleyways, and boulevards. Everyone trod the same mud, muck, and filth, breathing the same sour-smelling air, and around every corner was another stranger, another potential for danger that was to be avoided. There was no room, no space, no place to be alone, to think, to be. I was as hemmed in by the ring of stone that encircled the city as I had ever been trapped Underground as the Goblin King’s bride.

Josef’s shoulders relaxed, but his posture was still wary. “It feels like . . . it feels like home out there.”

Home. Until we arrived, I had never given much thought to the idea of home. For most of my life, home was where I lived and the people I loved. Home had been the inn and my family.