Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(56)

She watched me with those vivid, otherworldly green eyes. A jumble of half-started images and words and phrases tumbled through my mind—wife? child? Der Erlk?nig’s child? legacy family descendants found uprooted—the noise spinning into a blur of blankness. I blinked, and when I did not respond to her extraordinary claim in the manner she was apparently expecting, the Countess gave a little huff.

“Well,” she said, forcing a laugh, “this is not the reception to my revelation I had hoped for.”

“What was to be my response?” I asked, still in that stranger’s voice.

She gave an elegant shrug. “Surprise? Shock? Gratitude? Anger? Anything other than blankness, to be honest, my dear.”

The Count cleared his throat. “It is a lot to take in, darling.”

He was right. It was too much for my limited comprehension to encompass wholly, so I could only pick at the details as they became clear to me, one by one.

“Are you—are you a child of Der Erlk?nig?” Surely that wasn’t possible. A goblin girl told me long ago that no union of mortal and the Goblin King had ever been fruitful. And yet. My hand went to my lower belly. My bleeding had run their monthly courses as usual when I returned from the Underground. I felt a sharp stab of . . . envy? Relief? Emptiness? Exultation?

The Countess shook her head. “No, Elisabeth. I am not a child of Der Erlk?nig, unless you mean it in the sense that we—you, your brother, my husband, all those who believe, and I—are all his children. No,” she repeated, her voice growing soft and gentle. “I am a descendant of the Goblin Queen and her consort, a man who had once been the Lord of Mischief and the Ruler Underground. A daughter of a mortal woman . . . and a mortal man.” She looked to her husband, and he laid a hand on her shoulder.

“But they were both mortal . . .” I did not know how to phrase my question, or even what to ask. If what she said was true. If she indeed had powers spanning both the worlds above and below. If, if, if.

“How do I have my gift of opening and closing the barriers between worlds?” the Countess finished.

I nodded.

“Do you know the tale of Persephone?” she asked.

I blinked. “No,” I said slowly, feeling even more lost and unmoored than before. “I don’t believe so.”

“She was the daughter of Demeter,” the Count chimed in. Unlike his wife, his dark eyes were fixed on my face with a strange sort of compassion, even pity. “She was abducted by Hades and forced to become his bride.”

I shuddered, but not entirely with revulsion.

“Yes,” the Countess said. “Persephone ate the fruit of the underworld and was therefore condemned to spend half the year in Hades’s realm, the other half in the world above with her mother.”

A sudden pang of sympathy for Persephone swept through me. Sympathy and envy. Half the year with her family, the other half with her dark beloved. If only, if only.

“But what the story doesn’t say,” her husband added, “is that Persephone returned from the underworld changed. Different. A dark queen for a dark realm. The ancient Greeks dared not even speak her name, for to speak of her was to call her attention. So they called her Kore, which meant maiden.”

A sharp chill pierced through my numbness, sending shivers down my spine. Her name is lost to us, Twig had once said. The brave maiden. Nameless, and gone.

“Persephone returned changed,” the Countess said softly. “And so did the first Goblin Queen. When she reemerged into life from death, she came back different. She awoke with the ability to sense the rips in the world, the cracks, the in-between spaces, and to create them and to mend them. She was both of the Underground and the world above, and she passed that ability on to her children. To me.”

My heart skipped a beat. I remembered the last time I had seen my Goblin King standing in the Goblin Grove, the feel of our hands passing through each other’s like fingers through smoke, like holding on to a candle flame, insubstantial and painful all at once. What would I do for this ability? To pass between realms at will, to touch and hold and embrace my Goblin King in the flesh and not in memory?

“But,” the Countess said, “as you can see, I am the last of her bloodline. The last of us with this ability—this gift.”

Her voice hitched, a slight tremor that would have gone unnoticed if it weren’t for the tears glimmering in her eyes. I did not know if those tears were for a child she could not have, or a child she had had, then lost. Her husband’s hand on her shoulder tightened, the two of them taut and tense in their shared silent grief. Yet his features wore a troubled expression, as though this were a conversation he did not want to have.

“However,” she said huskily. “It appears I am not the last after all.” The Countess watched me, searching for my face for the answer to a question she did not ask. It was a long time before I replied.

“Me,” I said in a quiet voice. “You mean . . . me.”

The corners of her full red lips tilted upward slightly. “Yes,” she said. “You, O Goblin Queen.”

Silence stretched on between us. I did not know what to say. I did not know what to think, or even what to feel. When I made the decision to leave the Underground, I made the choice to live instead of to die, to seize what I wanted from the world instead of resigning myself to my fate. I had promised myself I would live every day as Elisabeth, entire.