Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(29)

Home had been the Goblin Grove and a soft-eyed young man.

“I know,” was all I said. It was all I could say.

Josef said nothing. The silence between us was pointed, its jabs meant for me. I had no defense against my brother’s coldness, and I felt each and every absent word like a knife between the ribs. Vienna had become our Tower of Babel, our speech broken by my mania and his melancholy. But it was more than communication that was missing between us; it was communion. Once Josef and I would have spent the quiet hours together without speaking, simply being with each other in the moment. Once he would have picked up his bow and I my hands, and we would have spoken across sound, across melody, across music. Once, once, once.

All was silent.

I watched my brother set down his violin case by the door. “You’ve been playing, I see.”

Talk to me, Sepp. Look at me. Acknowledge me.

He did not turn to face me. “And you haven’t been composing, I see.”

I hissed as I stabbed myself deeply with the needle. A drop of blood blossomed across the surface of the silk on which I was working, looking like poppy petals in the snow. I cursed under my breath. Several hours of work ruined. I did not know what I would tell K?the when she awoke.

Josef’s face was unreadable beyond the edge of the candle flame. “Soak it with cold salt water,” he said. He made his way to the cabinets where we kept our spices, and returned with a rag and a bowl filled with a bit of salt. He retrieved the pitcher of water from the washstand and poured a measure into the bowl. Taking my sewing from me, he dipped the tip of his rag in the solution and began dabbing at the stain.

How did he know to do this? Where? So much of my brother’s time away from me was a complete mystery. What he had learned under Master Antonius. What he had done in those weeks after the old virtuoso died and he had disappeared into the depths of Vienna. I had asked Fran?ois once, but it was the only time our shared understanding had ever failed. Neither boy could tell me what had happened to them. Could not. Would not.

The faintest trace of healing red welts flashed across the skin of my brother’s pale forearm as he worked. I sucked in a sharp breath. “Sepperl . . .”

The use of his childhood nickname made him pause, but when he caught me staring at his wrists, he was quick to pull down his sleeve. “You can do the rest,” he said shortly, shoving my sewing back at me.

“Sepp, I—”

“Do you need anything else, Elisabeth?” he asked. “If not, I will be off to bed.”

The use of my given name was a slap to the face. I had always been Liesl to him, only and ever Liesl. “I need . . .” I began, but trailed off. I need you to come back to me. I need you to be whole. I need you in order to be whole. “I need you to talk to me, Sepp.”

He looked me squarely in the face. “What could I possibly have to say to you?”

A sob caught in my throat. “How could you possibly be so cruel?”

“Me, cruel?” He laughed, and the sound was a little feral, a little wild. “Oh, Liesl. It is you who are cruel. It is you who lie. Not me. Not I.”

I blinked the tears from my eyes. “How have I been cruel, Sepperl?”

The light in his icy blue gaze shone with something like contempt, even malice. I was taken aback. The youth who stood before me was no longer the child I knew. Since being reunited, I had marked how my brother had grown: lean and lanky with his height, the last of his baby fat withered from his smile to reveal sharp cheekbones and an even sharper chin. But it was more than the visible changes time had wrought upon him that made him unfamiliar to me; it was the invisible ones that turned him into a stranger. I wondered then what my real brother—the one stolen by changelings—would have looked like now. I immediately quashed the treacherous thought, furious with myself for even thinking it.

“Is this where you want to have our reckoning?” Josef’s voice was quiet. It was an unquiet quiet, the hush before a winter storm. “Because we can have it now. Right this moment. With both Fran?ois and our sister to overhear.”

I glanced to the sleeping boy in the bed beside the table. Fran?ois’s eyes were closed, but there was a waiting stillness to every line of his body. He was listening. The door to the room I shared with K?the was cracked open a sliver, and I caught the reflected gleam of her summer-blue eyes before they winked out into darkness. I looked away.

“I thought so.” Josef’s face was hard.

“Fine,” I said. “Be off to bed then. I shall see you in the morning.” I shoved my sewing to the side and made to blow out the candle when I felt my brother’s hand about my wrist.

“Liesl.” His voice cracked, leaping several octaves as it hadn’t in several months now, unexpectedly young and vulnerable. “I . . . I—”

I held my breath. A gossamer-fragile truce, a filament of peace, and I dared not exhale lest I disturb it altogether.

The moments stretched on, and beneath and between us, a growing chasm.

“I wish you good night,” my brother said at last.

I shut my eyes. “Good night, Josef.”

He blew out the candle. I made my way to my own bed, stumbling through the dark.

And then a voice from the shadows, so soft I could have imagined it:

“Sweet dreams, Liesl.”


*

I did not dream.