Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(55)
“Yes,” he breathed. If this place was not yet peace, then it was a balm to his soul: a room once dedicated to music and dance, now slowly becoming swallowed by the living, sleeping green. Twelve mirrored panels around him, like the twelve alder trees encircling the Goblin Grove; it felt both familiar and foreign. Back when he was a boy, before Master Antonius, before Vienna, before all the weight and expectations placed upon him, Josef had played his music in a place like this.
He set his case down and opened it, lifting his violin to his shoulder. He had no gloves and his fingers were cold, but Josef had long perfected the art of playing through numbness. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the scent of dirt and dust and deep woods filling his lungs. With the bow poised over his strings, he smiled. Then played.
And the world changed.
If there was anything left in his life that Josef loved, it was this. Music. The only thing of human invention he preferred to that of nature’s creation. Birdsong and cricket choruses had been the orchestra of his childhood, but his sister’s music had always been his star. His first soloist. When she sang him lullabies in the dark. When she wrote him little melodies to practice on the violin. It was as though he had learned to speak through the notes and lines and staff on the page. Language without words. Communion without communication.
The brambles and branches stirred at the sound of the violin. A sense of wakefulness came to a world deep in winter slumber, the intake of a breath before rousing. Beneath him and around him, the forest reached, stretched, grew, as though answering a call. The broken mirrored panels showed myriad boys amidst myriad trees, but Josef did not notice that all but one played the same song.
He transitioned from warmups and exercises to the largo from Vivaldi’s L’inverno, which had been his favorite piece since he was very young. Yet as his bow sang the notes, Josef felt distant. Removed. He could no longer remember why he had loved or cared so for this movement, only that the thrill of its melody was now gone. He thought of his father then, a man for whom one drink, then two, then three, then four or five or six had ceased to be enough. Had ceased to affect him.
The memory of his father marred Josef’s playing, and he hit a sour note. He stopped playing, and all the boys in the mirrors went still.
All save one.
Although Josef had lowered his instrument and his bow, still the sound of the violin carried on. Not an echo, but a reflection. The melody was familiar. Beloved. Cherished.
Der Erlk?nig.
Emotion blossomed in Josef’s chest—pain, fear, guilt, relief, excitement, tenderness. His sister’s music had a way of opening him up to feeling, of digging up the parts of himself he had left buried back home in the Goblin Grove. He turned and searched for Liesl—to apologize, to reach out for solace or comfort—but he was alone, with only a thousand versions of himself to keep him company. A thousand blue eyes and a thousand violins stared back at Josef as he gazed into the shattered mirrors, but at the corner of his eye, one of the other Josefs moved.
He turned and turned, but as it was with the way of reflections, the perspective shifted and changed with every movement of his head. It was only when he kept still, when the other Josefs stopped turning, that he could see one of them coming closer. He tried to catch his own eye, but his reflection remained on the edges of his vision, on the edges of his sanity.
Minutes. Hours. It wasn’t until Der Erlk?nig ended that he was face to face with his errant reflection. The other Josef wore a smile on his face that wasn’t mirrored on his own, and he held his violin on the opposite side. Or perhaps the correct side. He no longer knew what was left and right in this inside-out world.
“Who are you?” Josef asked, but his reflection’s mouth did not move in time with his.
I am you, the other Josef replied.
“And who am I?” he whispered.
The reflection only smiled.
THE BRAVE MAIDEN’S TALE, REPRISE
the brave maiden.
I was sitting with a descendant of the brave maiden. The first of us to die, and the only one of us survive the Goblin King’s embrace.
Until me.
“You . . . you . . .” I began, but my words trailed off into nothingness.
“Me, me,” the Countess repeated, although there was no hint of mockery in her voice. “Yes, Goblin Queen,” she said softly. “She walked away from the Underground, and lived. I am proof. And for hundreds of years, for several generations, her daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters were guardians and keepers of the balance between worlds, between the world above and the realms below.”
The crash and thunder of my beating heart hollowed out my ears, drowning all sound and sense. I watched the Countess’s lips move, but could not understand, could not comprehend a single word coming from her mouth. The notion was too big—too significant—to accept. The world narrowed to a small, singular idea.
I was not alone.
“Child? Child?” The scope and scale of my thoughts widened once more to encompass the chair I was sitting on, the room I was in, the person who was speaking to me. “My dear, are you all right? You look quite pale. Konrad, would you bring Mademoiselle Vogler something stronger than coffee to drink? A bit of sherry, perhaps?”
“I’m fine,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. It came from a place both far inside and outside of me, a voice so calm as to belong to another Liesl, another Elisabeth altogether. “I don’t need a drink.”