Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(4)

“What Josef needs,” Constanze said, “is to come home.”

“And just what is there for my son to come home to?” Mother asked, angrily attacking old rust stains on a dented pot.

K?the and I exchanged glances, but kept our hands busy and our mouths shut.

“Nothing, that’s what,” she continued bitterly. “Nothing but a long, slow trek to the poorhouse.” She set down the scrubbing brush with a sudden clang, pinching the bridge of her nose with a soapy hand. The furrow between her brows had come and gone, come and gone ever since Papa’s death, digging in deeper and deeper with each passing day.

“And leave Josef to fend for himself?” I asked. “What is he going to do so far away and without friends?”

Mother bit her lip. “What would you have us do?”

I had no answer. We did not have the funds to either send ourselves or to bring him home.

She shook her head. “No,” she said decisively. “It’s better that Josef stay in Vienna. Try his luck and make his mark on the world as God intended.”

“It doesn’t matter what God intends,” Constanze said darkly, “but what the old laws demand. Cheat them of their sacrifice, and we all pay the price. The Hunt comes, and brings with them death, doom, and destruction.”

A sudden hiss of pain. I looked up in alarm to see K?the suck at her knuckles where she had accidentally cut herself with the knife. She quickly resumed cooking dinner, but her hands trembled as she sliced wet dough for noodles. I rose to my feet and took over making sp?tzle from my sister as she gratefully moved to frying the onions.

Mother made a disgusted noise. “Not this again.” She and Constanze had been at each other’s throats for as long as I could remember, the sound of their bickering as familiar as the sound of Josef practicing his scales. Not even Papa had been able to make peace between them, for he always deferred to his mother even as he preferred to side with his wife. “If I weren’t already certain of your comfortable perch in Hell, thou haranguing harpy, I would pray for your eternal soul.”

Constanze banged her hand on the table, making the letter—and the rest of us—jump. “Can’t you see it is Josef’s soul I am trying to save?” she shouted, spittle flying from her lips.

We were taken aback. Despite her irritable and irascible nature, Constanze rarely lost her temper. She was, in her own way, as consistent and reliable as a metronome, ticking back and forth between contempt and disdain. Our grandmother was fearsome, not fearful.

Then my brother’s voice returned to me. I was born here. I was meant to die here.

I sloppily dumped the noodles into the pot, splashing myself with scalding hot water. Unbidden, the image of coal black eyes in a sharp-featured face rose up from the depths of memory.

“Girl,” Constanze rasped, fixing her dark eyes on me. “You know what he is.”

I said nothing. The burble of boiling water and the sizzle of sautéing onions were the only sounds in the kitchen as K?the and I finished cooking.

“What?” Mother asked. “What do you mean?”

K?the glanced at me sidelong, but I merely strained the sp?tzle and tossed the noodles into the skillet with the onions.

“What on earth are you talking about?” Mother demanded. She turned to me. “Liesl?”

I beckoned to K?the to bring me the plates and began serving supper.

“Well?” Constanze smirked. “What say you, girlie?”

You know what he is.

I thought of the careless wishes I had made into the dark as a child—for beauty, for validation, for praise—but none had been as fervent or as desperate as the one I had made when I heard my brother crying feebly into the night. K?the, Josef, and I had all been stricken with scarlatina when we were young. K?the and I were small children, but Josef had been but a baby. The worst had passed for my sister and me, but my brother emerged from the illness a different child.

A changeling.

“I know exactly who my brother is,” I said in a low voice, more to myself than to my grandmother. I set a dish heaped high with noodles and onions in front of her. “Eat up.”

“Then you know why it is Josef must return,” Constanze said. “Why he must come home and live.”

We all come back in the end.

A changeling could not wander far from the Underground, lest they wither and fade. My brother could not live beyond the reach of Der Erlk?nig, save by the power of love. My love. It was what kept him free.

Then I remembered the feel of spindly fingers crawling over my skin like bramble branches, a face wrought of hands, and a thousand hissing voices whispering, Your love is a cage, mortal.

I looked to the letter on the table. Come quickly.

“Are you going to eat your supper?” I asked, glancing pointedly at Constanze’s full plate.

She gave her food a haughty look and sniffed. “I’m not hungry.”

“Well, you’re not getting anything else, you ungrateful nag.” Mother angrily stabbed at her supper with her fork. “We can’t afford to cater to your particular tastes. We can barely afford to feed ourselves as it is.”

Her words dropped with a thud in the middle of our dinner. Chastened, Constanze picked up her fork and began eating, chewing around that depressing pronouncement. Although we had settled all of Papa’s debts after he died, for every bill we paid, yet another sprung up in its place, leaks on a sinking ship.