Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(54)

I frowned. “How?”

“I told you that those of us touched by Der Erlk?nig can reach across the barrier.” She held her hands apart. “We can find the windows and”—she clapped her hands shut—“close them. You can do this, Elisabeth,” she said, nodding toward me. “As can I.”

“You?” She nodded again. I narrowed my eyes. “What are you?”

The Countess and her husband exchanged another glance. This time, he held her gaze and gave her the slightest of nods. She turned back to me, those eyes of hers large, luminous, and an impossibly bright green. “I am of his blood,” she said in a low voice. “My foremother was the first of his brides. A brave maiden, who gave her life for the world, then doomed that very same world to bring Der Erlk?nig back from death.”





a voice from the deep places of the world called his name and Josef awoke. The sun was streaming in through windows and past curtains he had forgotten to close the night before, long past morning but not yet noon. For a moment, he thought he was back home at the inn, for the air held the faint, crisp freshness of pine and dirt and snow.

And then he remembered.

The weight of his argument with Liesl pressed heavily on his chest, pushing him back into his bed linens, a suffocating pressure that made it hard to breathe and to get out of bed.

During their entire flight from Vienna, Josef had sensed his sister’s unease, her anxiety, her manic restlessness at the uncertainty of their futures. He had sensed it, and tried to care. But he didn’t. Couldn’t. He knew that he ought to be worried, he ought to have been frightened, for the revelations the Procházkas had bestowed upon them were alarming and unbelievable. Yet at the same time, the effort it took him to muster anything beyond vague concern was exhausting, and Josef had been tired for a long, long time.

He contemplated staying in bed all day. There were no places to go, no people to see, no auditions to prepare for. There were, he realized, no expectations set upon him. He waited for happiness, for excitement, or even relief, but there was nothing but the same dull indifference that had plagued him since he left Bavaria. Since he left home.

But years of rising early to practice the violin were still buried deep within his muscles and bones. Josef shook off the remnants of sleep and roused himself, finding a clean set of clothes outside his door. He had not yet learned how to fill his hours without music, and the itch and the urge to play lingered in his fingers. He got dressed and picked up his violin.

Liesl was already gone by the time he left his room, and the housekeeper from the previous night was nowhere to be found. There was absolutely no one else in sight as he wandered through the wings and halls of Snovin, which suited Josef just fine. He had never been able to hear himself think in the presence of anyone else save his eldest sister and Fran?ois. It was why he found playing in front of an audience so intolerable.

As Josef passed from room to room, the manor’s state of decay became more and more noticeable. Shafts of light cut through the collapsed roofs and empty windows, dust motes dancing in the sunbeam like fairy lights. Winter still had its hold on this mountainous estate, but he didn’t mind the cold. It was calm. Clean, despite the dirt and twigs and creatures scurrying underfoot. It put him in mind of the forest just beyond the inn, a vast change from the filthy, smelly, and crowded homes in the city. Here he could play. Here he could find communion within himself again.

But despite the ease and familiarity he felt within these inside-out walls, he couldn’t find the right place to pull his violin from its case. He was searching for the sense of sacredness that had come with the Goblin Grove. He was seeking sanctuary.

“Help me,” he whispered to no one in particular. “Help me find peace.”

A clock chimed the hour.

To his right stood a grandfather clock, its face painted and gilded with the movement of the heavens. Its hands were not pointed to an hour, despite its sounding gong, and Josef could have sworn the spheres moving across their heavenly paths were still just a moment before. Behind him, there was a soft, grinding, clicking sound, the faint scream of rusted metal over metal. He turned to look.

A suit of armor was lifting its arm.

Tales of enchanted goblin-made armor rose up in his mind, imbued with a magic that made its wearer impervious to arrows and injuries and death. Such stories also came with accounts of fearsome fighting prowess, of the warrior defeating off hordes of the enemy with a skill in battle that was either preternatural or pretend. Not real. Not truly belonging to the warrior, but to the Underground.

Josef watched with detached fascination as the suit of armor lifted its arm, curled its fingers, and pointed down one of the corridors as if in answer to his question.

Help me. Help me find peace.

“That way?” he asked, mirroring the armor’s gesture.

Its empty, helmeted head moved up, then down, then up, then down in a herky-jerky motion, a grotesque parody of a nod.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

He followed the path of the armor’s direction, walking down a long, dark, high-ceilinged corridor toward a set of large double doors, opened ajar. Light spilled in through the crack, but shakily, unsteadily, as though shadows moved in the room beyond. He reached the doors, placed his hands on the ornately carved knockers, and pushed.

It was a ballroom.

The space was empty, although shadows still danced at the corners of his vision. A circular room paneled with many large, broken mirrors, the ballroom reflecting both light and movement like a prism. The cracked marble floors rippled with growing roots, dead ivy and desiccated vine crawling down the walls like fingers reclaiming the room. Josef and the wild were mirrored over and over, a thousand boys standing in a forest.