Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(65)
Whether or it was the kindness or plea that undid the wolf-child, Mahieu did not know, but the vl?ek dropped his treasures and began to weep. The boy had endured much since he emerged from the beast’s lair, kicking and spitting, had learned how to eat and dress and walk, but what he had never done was cry. The shine of tears had turned his mismatched eyes brilliant, and their glittering beauty stole Mahieu’s breath away.
“Come,” he whispered. “Come, we must flee.”
He held out his hand to the vl?ek, who stared at the outstretched palm with neither suspicion nor fear on his face. The wolf-boy held Mahieu’s gaze, and for a moment, eternity and a question stretched between them.
“Yes,” the vl?ek said. “Yes.”
His voice was rough and hoarse, his tongue thick and unused. But it was words, real words, more words than anyone had ever heard him say. The vl?ek grasped Faithful Mahieu’s hand, and the two of them ran into the forest, into the beyond, and the unknown.
THE MONSTER I CLAIM
my brother did not join us for dinner.
I hadn’t expected him to show his face, yet the sting of disappointment was just as sharp this time as it had been the first. Our meal was a polite enough affair, but my hosts couldn’t contain their curiosity about Josef forever. They asked several questions about his skill with the violin, about his talent, about his musical gifts. I understood that prodigies and virtuosos were marvelous and unusual, but their interest in my brother’s abilities over mine picked at wounds that should have long since scabbed over.
Special Liesl. Chosen Liesl. You have always wanted to be extraordinary and now you are.
Cold, oily guilt slicked my stomach with resentment and regret, and I found I had no appetite. The remainder of the meal was stilted and awkward, and I tasted none of the food that Nina had prepared for us. The fare was simple and hearty: sausages and stews, dumplings and cream sauce, braised cabbage and hearty breads. Familiar. Comforting. But it all turned leaden in my gut.
After dinner, I returned to my quarters to find the door between Josef’s room and mine still shut. I did not know whether or not he had retired for the evening or if he hadn’t returned from his daytime wanderings. I undressed and climbed into my bed, though the hour was early. I was tired from our excursion to the monastery that afternoon, and I could use the rest.
Yet try as I might, I could not sleep. Silence pounded at my ears with the absence of sound. Back home, the forest chorus would have lulled me to sleep with its symphony of cacophony. In Vienna, the constant hum and drumming rhythm of human lives formed the bass line to my staccato days. But here, in Snovin, all was quiet. It was an empty sort of quiet. Once I would have sensed, would have known down to my marrow, whether or not Josef slept on the other side of a door, a window, a wall. The tether between us, woven of our love of music and magic, had frayed so badly that only the barest thread of blood tied us together.
And we weren’t even bound by that.
I turned over in bed, squeezing my eyes shut as though I could shut out my own guilt.
The other times that particular disloyal thought about Josef crossed my traitorous mind, my body was racked with self-loathing and disgust. But tonight I let myself examine it. Let myself think about what it meant—what I felt—that my brother was not my brother, but a changeling.
A changeling. Before I had gone Underground, I might have been delighted. Or proud. Or even envious for many of the same reasons Josef was jealous of me now. I understood better than anyone the pain of being unremarkable. Had I not privately railed to myself about how my brother’s talent set him apart from the rest of us? Music was a language we shared, and it hurt to know that not only was he better than me, he was anointed by Papa. To have discovered that my brother not only had a connection to the world of myth and magic to which we often escaped but an actual belonging to it might have devastated me.
Special. Chosen. Extraordinary. Josef had chosen his words well, for the accusations cut me to the quick. I curled up tighter into a ball, pulling my pillow over my face to blot out the last dregs of the setting sun.
But since I had walked away from the Underground, my thoughts about changelings had changed. I remembered the comely youths with whom my sister and I had danced at the goblin ball with their elegant faces and inscrutable eyes. The creature by the lake who had tricked me into crossing the barrier between worlds by playing on my homesickness and my longing for the simple pleasures of mortal life. Deceitful, tricksy, cruel. Inhuman.
Josef was inhuman. Josef was not mortal. Josef was a creature, a sprite, a thing. My entire being cringed at the notion of my brother as a thing. If my brother was not human, he was at the very least a person. He laughed, he cried, he sulked, he raged. He reasoned and felt the same as any other boy—youth—and it did not matter that his bone and blood was of otherkin, not mine.
And yet, it did. I thought of the baby who should have grown up to be my brother, the child of my parents’ mortal get. The one whose name and place and life my brother stole. That Josef had been a cheerful, easygoing child, ruddy-cheeked and sparkly-eyed. My Josef was a colicky, cranky baby, a difficult and disagreeable child that I nevertheless loved. Perhaps loved even more than the boy who shared my blood.
I should have been disgusted with myself. I loved a usurper, a thief, a monster. I turned the Goblin King’s ring over and over on my finger, feeling the silver slide smoothly across my skin.