Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(49)
And with that, he and his wife swept indoors with Konrad, leaving us alone with the housekeeper.
“This way,” Nina said in thickly accented German. We followed her past the great entrance hall and toward the east wing of the house, down a flight of stairs, up another, through a set of doors, around a corner, then up and down and around and around again until I was thoroughly lost. If I thought solving the hedge maze in the Procházkas’ garden was difficult, it was nothing compared to this.
Our path through the estate was silent, for Nina’s grasp of German seemed to be limited to the two words given earlier, and Josef kept his own counsel. Although he seemed less closed off and withdrawn than before, I still had no idea of what he thought or felt of our strange adventure. Whether he was frightened. Nervous. Excited. Relieved. That face I had known and loved his entire life was opaque to me, as though he wore a mask of his own features.
We passed no one else on our way to our rooms—no footmen, no maids, no gardeners—a stark contrast to the liveried servants at Procházka House. The grounds at Snovin Hall were extensive and would have required a great deal of care, more than what a middle-aged housekeeper and seneschal could provide. The neglect showed in a myriad ways: in the warped wooden window frames, the cobweb-dusted furniture in empty rooms, the birds’ nests and rodent burrows tucked into the exposed eaves and moldering couch cushions. The world outside crept in through the crevices, vines crawling up rotted wallpaper, weeds working their way through the cracks in the floor.
I am the inside-out man.
Soon we emerged into a nicer—or at least, better kept—part of the house. As with their domicile in Vienna, the Procházkas possessed a number of exquisite curios at their country estate: tiny pewter farmers threshing wheat, a herd of bronze sheep leaping over fences, a beautifully ornate clock with golden rings that circled the hours of the heavens. Each of these trinkets were mechanical like the swan in their banquet hall, moving with fluid motions almost too smooth to be real.
We walked up another flight of stairs until we arrived at a long gallery. Nina unlocked one of the doors and we followed her into our quarters, a suite of connected rooms. A large, double-sided fireplace divided our sleeping quarters, with doors on either side that could be shut to maintain our privacy. The fires were already lit, and the rooms pleasantly warm and dry—almost toasty—compared to the drafty corridor just beyond the threshold. The rooms themselves were comfortably appointed, if a bit threadbare. There was a secondhand quality to all the furniture, although they all seemed to be heirloom pieces. A washbasin and pitcher of water stood on the bedside table in the room, but there was no mirror atop the vanity. I thought of the fifty florins the Countess had gifted me in order to lure me to Vienna and wondered why their ancestral seat was in such shabby condition. They had the funds to maintain Snovin Hall, surely.
“Is good?” Nina smiled, her dark eyes nearly lost in the crinkle of dumpling cheeks.
“It’s fine, thank you,” I said.
She nodded and pointed to a cupboard full of linens and candles. “Is good?” she asked again. Then she said something in Bohemian I couldn’t figure out. The housekeeper mimed eating, and after some back and forth, I understood that trays of food would be sent to our rooms.
“Thank you, Nina,” I said.
The housekeeper glanced at Josef, who had kept sullen, silent watch during the entire exchange. He did not offer his gratitude, either genuine or perfunctory, and Nina left us, looking a little disgruntled. Her footsteps tapped out rude, rude, rude, growing fainter in the distance.
We were alone.
For a long time, neither my brother nor I said a word. We had not yet decided whose room was which, but neither of us made a move to claim either as our own. The crackling of the fire filled the space between us, making conversation with the shadows on the wall. There was so much I had to say to Josef, and yet there was nothing to be said at all.
“Well, mein Brüderchen,” I said softly. “Here we are.”
He met my gaze. “Yes,” he said. “We are.”
And for the first time in an age, I saw my brother, really and truly saw him. Until that moment, I had seen Josef as the little boy who had left me behind—sweet, sensitive, shy. My Sepperl. Sepp. But the man who stood before me was not that child.
He was taller, certainly, and lean with his height, towering over me by a head. His golden curls were overgrown, not in the manner that was currently fashionable in the cosmopolitan places of the world, but in the absentminded way of a genius who had more pressing concerns on his mind than his appearance. Time had honed all the softness from his cheeks and chin so that he was no longer the cherub-faced sprite of our childhood, but a gangly-limbed youth. His blue eyes were harder, less innocent, his gaze distant and dispassionate.
Yet there remained that ineffable ethereality in those clear depths that had stirred my protective heart ever since he was a babe in the cradle. Since he had been changed for the child that was the brother of my blood, if not the brother of my heart.
“Oh, Sepp,” I whispered. “What are we doing?”
It was a while before he answered. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice breaking a little. “I don’t know.”
And just like that, the wall he had constructed around him came crumbling down. The mask fell, and the brother I loved, the gardener of my heart, appeared.