Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(36)

My goblin girl held out her hands to me in turn, but our fingers passed through the other’s like smoke. Her lips moved but no sound emerged but the sighing of the mistral breeze.

“Twig?” I rasped. “Twig? What is it?”

She opened her mouth to speak, then choked, the patches of stone on her skin seeming to writhe and grow.

“Twig!”

The covenant is undone. There was terror in her depthless black eyes, the first human emotion I had ever seen on a goblin’s face. It is corrupting us. Corrupting him.

Him. The Goblin King. My austere young man.

“Twig!” I grabbed her hand, but got nothing but a fistful of thorns. “Twig!”

Save us. Twig cried out in silent anguish, her body cracking, popping, snapping in unnatural ways as she resisted crumpling back into bush and brush. Save him.

“How?” I cried over the screaming wind. “Tell me!”

My goblin girl’s eyes rolled back in her head as vines burst from the ground, crisscrossing her body like chains around a prisoner. With tremendous effort, she lifted a hand and pointed a many-jointed finger at my feet.

The . . . poppies . . .

Looking down, I saw that I was standing in a river of red, a trail of blood leading away from me like a guided path of scarlet petals.

“Twig?”

Nothing remained but stars, winking at me through bramble branches. I thought I could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance, a gale howling just beyond the edges of the hedge maze. Hoofbeats and the baying of hounds in a hunt. The Wild Hunt.

The old laws made flesh: given steel and teeth and hounds to reap what they are owed.

Heart hammering, I raced along the path of poppies, trying to outrun and outpace the clang and the bang of alarm bells ringing in my mind. Behind me, I thought I could hear heavy breathing, the thudding footfalls of a pursuer. Turn after turn after turn, until I lost sight of the flowers and understood too late that I had become lost in the labyrinth.

And still the violin played on.

I pressed a hand to my breast, trying to catch my breath. A name came to my lips—Josef? K?the? Fran?ois?—but who would find me here, alone and anonymous? I thought of the Goblin King, and the burn in my chest intensified to a soul-deep ache.

The bushes rustled behind me. I turned to look, and gasped.

Looming in the shadows was a figure, skin night-black and eyes moon pale. Fingers broken and gnarled like desiccated vines curled around the neck of a violin, the resin cracked and peeled with age. A crown of horns grew from a nest of cobwebs and thistledown, but the face that stared back at me was human. Familiar.

Him.

“M-mein Herr?”

No sound from his lips, no movement of his head. The face that stared back was dear to me for all that it had changed, but it was like gazing into the eyes of a stranger. The mismatched irises had faded entirely to a blue-white that glowed in the dark, and there was no hint of recognition in their depths.

“Mein Herr?” I said again.

But no glimmer or spark of love warmed those icy eyes. I did not know if I could bear the weight of my shattered heart.

“Oh, mein Herr,” I said, voice catching. “What have they done to you? What have I done?”

Slowly, carefully, so as not to startle a frightened forest creature, I lifted my hand, fingers outstretched. I reached for his cheek, to press my palm against his skin, to feel his flesh beneath my touch. The Goblin King held himself still as I drew just a bit closer, a bit closer, our eyes locked as I pushed and tested the new edges between us. His pupils grew dilated, and the pale ring of color around them deepened to a gray-blue, a muted green.

“Elisabeth?”

His head snapped up at the sound of someone calling my name.

“Elisabeth!”

“No,” I whispered. “No, please, be, thou, with me—”

But he was gone in the next blink. The face I had been so close to caressing was the wind-smoothed wood of a cherry tree, the crown of horns its branches, his eyes a pair of stars in the night sky, winking at me in cruel jest. A wave of resignation and despair nearly overwhelmed me to my knees. Of course this had all been nothing but a bad dream. Nothing but my longing and loneliness giving life to the shadows in my mind.

“Elisabeth? Ah, there you are!” said an unfamiliar, faintly accented voice.

Glancing over my shoulder, I nearly fainted when I saw a skull hovering beside me, its teeth bared in a ghoulish grin.

“My dear? Are you all right?” The skull tilted back, and it was in that moment I realized I had not been staring at a disembodied skeleton, but a plump little man draped in a black cloak with a death’s-head mask perched atop his face. An incredibly realistic and detailed death’s-head mask.

“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered. “Who are you?”

“I am Der Tod,” the stranger chuckled. “I thought the costume was obvious.” He beckoned toward me with the tip of his toy scythe. “And you, my dear, are my lost little angel of music. We have been looking for you for over an hour.”

I held myself close, not wanting to make any sudden movements lest I spook this odd little man into doing something unpredictable. “We?” I asked. “Who’s been looking for me?”

“My wife and me, of course,” he said blithely, as though it were the most obvious answer in the world. “We’ve been waiting for you a long time. Now, my dear, let us make our way back to the party.”