Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(50)

I held my arms open for a hug as though he were still a boy and not a man near full-grown. But Josef walked into my embrace without a second thought, wrapping his arms around me. The tears that had been simmering beneath my lashes ever since I walked away from the Goblin Grove slipped down my cheeks. I had missed my brother, yes, but it wasn’t until this moment that I understood just how much.

“Oh, Sepp,” I said again.

“Liesl.” His was a man’s voice now, deeper and fuller. It carried all the rich resonance of his experiences, and would only grow richer with time, acquired with knowledge like a violin resined with age. My heart beat a painful tattoo, Don’t grow up, Sepp, never grow up.

“How did we get there?” I asked in a muffled voice. “What are we to do?”

I felt Josef’s shoulders lift in a shrug. “What we’ve always done, I suppose. Survive.”

A sober stillness fell over us. We both knew how to survive. We had done it our entire lives, in different ways. It wasn’t just the long cold nights and empty bellies we endured to make ends meet; my brother had long suffered under our father’s crushing expectations. My expectations. I thought I had been helping him shoulder his burdens, yet I had done nothing but add to the weight with my resentment. My arms tightened around him. I did not know how to tell him I was sorry. Not with words.

“Are you frightened?” I asked, unable to look at him. “Of . . . the Wild Hunt? The Procházkas? Of . . . everything? I am.”

There was no reply but the steady beating of his heart. “I’m frightened,” he said at last. “But I think I’ve been frightened ever since I left home. Fear has been my constant companion for so long I think I’ve forgotten how to feel anything else.”

Guilt squeezed my ribs in a painful grip, and fresh tears started in my eyes. “I’m sorry, Sepperl.”

He extricated himself from my embrace. “It’s over and done now, Liesl,” he said in a dull voice. “This is where I live. This never-ending haze of fear and longing and dissatisfaction. Vienna or no, it is all the same to me.”

Worry pierced through my remorse. “What of K?the? And Fran?ois? Don’t you want to go home?”

Josef gave a bitter laugh. “Do you?”

I was about to respond that of course I did when I realized I wasn’t sure what my brother meant by home. Vienna? Or the Goblin Grove? Or, I thought with a stab of alarm, the Underground?

We all come back in the end.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I know now that Vienna was perhaps a mistake. But to go back . . .” I trailed off.

“Would be an admission of failure?” Josef asked softly. His voice was gentle.

“Yes,” I said. “And . . . and no.” I thought of the words of the old rector. The queer, the wild, the strange, the elf-touched—they are said to belong to the Goblin King. I had tried so long and so hard to move on that I was afraid of returning to the places where his ghost still lingered. To return to the Goblin Grove would be returning to a self I had outgrown, trying to tuck who I had become back into the seams of another girl. Then I thought of the vision I had had, of Der Erlk?nig transformed, tortured, treacherous.

His ring weighed heavily on my finger.

Josef studied me. “What happened?” he asked carefully. He gestured vaguely toward the world outside, toward the forest beyond, the roads back over the Alps to the Goblin Grove. “Did you—did you meet . . . him?”

Him. Der Erlk?nig. The Goblin King. My nameless, austere young man.

“Yes,” I said, the word forced from me in a choking laugh. “Yes, Sepperl, I have.”

He sucked in a breath. I could see his pulse fluttering at the base of his throat, his eyes dilating to a depthless black. Interest honed his features to sharp edges. Interest, and envy.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. Where to begin? What did he want to know? What could I tell him? That the stories Constanze told us were real? That there was a fantastic world just below and beyond our mortal ken? The glowing lake, the Lorelei, the glittering cavernous ballrooms, the skittering beetle-eyed goblins, the needle-whiskered tailors? What of the chapel, the receiving room, the mirrors that were windows into another world? How could I reveal that the magic was real . . . without revealing the truth of who—or what—he was?

We all come back in the end.

“I—I don’t know if I can, Sepp,” I said. “Not yet.”

His eyes narrowed. “I see.”

Something about his tone niggled at me. I frowned. “See what?”

“No, no, I understand,” he continued, the corner of his upper lip lifting in a curl. “Special Liesl. Chosen Liesl. You’ve always wanted to be extraordinary, and now you are.”

My mouth fell open and I blinked. It was as though my brother had punched me in the gut; I could barely breathe for the pain. We had been circling each other for a long time, Josef and I, taking swift swipes at each other with razor-keen comments, enough to sting but not enough to wound. A dance of provocation, not injury. We might have been cold and cruel to each other, but this was the first time my brother had been actively malicious.

“Is that what you think of me?” I whispered.

He turned his head away, refusing to answer. Refusing to dignify his underhanded move with an explanation, taking the coward’s way out. Well, two could play at that game. If my brother wanted to fight dirty, then I would gladly oblige him.