Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(85)
“Mistress?”
I snap to attention, my body alive with the sound of a familiar voice, tickling all the memory parts of me with a feather touch. Two goblin girls sway and tilt before me, one with thistledown for hair, the other with branches upon her head.
“Twig! Thistle!” I cry with delight.
Their faces are strange to me, for suddenly I can read the words of their emotions upon their eyes and lips. They are worried and they are frightened, and I marvel at the humanness of their expressions, and the goblinness of my thoughts.
“Have you come to bring me to the party? You should throw me a ball if there is none. Invite the changelings, invite the old laws, invite the world!”
The last time I came, there was a ball in my honor, where I had danced with the Goblin King and my sister. A goblin ball, a fairy ball, a ball of too much wine and indulgence, tasting of blackberry tongues and sin.
“Der Erlk?nig is waiting for you,” says Thistle, and I hear the twinning of her voice with another. My grandmother’s snappish tone harmonizes with the goblin girl’s words, saying things she would rather not have me hear. I care about you. I am frightened for you.
“Of course, Constanze,” I reply, and float to my feet with a smile. “Take me to him!”
The other goblin girl wrings her hands, dripping her nervousness like puddles onto the floor. “He is . . . changed, Your Highness.”
Changed. The man into a monster, the boy to a changeling, the composer to a madwoman. We are butterflies and the Underground is our chrysalis, a place of transformations and magic and miracles.
“I know,” I say. “He is corrupted. A corrupt king for a corrupt queen.”
My goblin girls exchange looks. “You are not safe,” says Thistle. Contempt laces her voice but tastes cold like fear, with the unexpectedly bitter burn of concern lingering on the tongue.
“I know,” I say again. My smile grows wider, my eyes madder. “I know.”
“It is not Der Erlk?nig you should fear,” Twig whispers, “but the reckoning he is owed.”
I open my arms wide, my robes of spider-silk and black lace billowing in an unseen wind. I am a top out of control, toppling and wobbling back and forth, back and forth, and the exhilaration and uncertainty excites me, for I do not know where I will go or what I will say.
“I am the Goblin Queen,” I giggle. “I can pay whatever is asked of me.” The words bubble from my lips and pop with little bursts of arrogance before me. I laugh again, feeling the tickle on my tongue.
“Even if it is the changeling boy?” Thistle asks.
My arms fall to my sides, and I fall over, the center thrown from me. Josef. How bothersome that I could not shed my love for him as easily as I gave up my reason. My heart cracks, and the pieces belonging to my brother glow and pulse through the cage of bones. I am a skeleton draped in cobwebs with a candle flame at its core. My sanity was my prison and my armor and without it, the flame flickers this way and that, buffeted by forces beyond my control. I lift my hands to cover my naked heart, but it is not enough to shield it.
“My brother has nothing to do with this,” I say.
“Oh but he has everything to do with this,” Thistle returns. “After all, is he not the reason you came back?”
“Yes, but I won’t give him back!” Petulance forces my lips into a pout. “He’s mine!”
Twig and Thistle’s eyes slide back and forth, from my face to each other. Selfish, selfish, selfish, they seem to say. I want to snatch those beetling eyes and wear them like rings about my fingers, to shut up their unvoiced censure.
“Stop looking at me,” I snap. “Stop judging me.”
My goblin girls look at each other again. “As you wish, Your Highness,” they say. “As you wish.”
*
I demanded a ball, but the gathering of goblins and changelings in the enormous, glittering cavern do not look as though they are enjoying themselves. There is no music, no dancing, no feasting, no flirting. I cast my gaze thither and hither, both disturbed and delighted by the transparency of feelings upon their features. When last I visited the Underground, it was as though I visited a foreign land, the language just familiar enough to be intelligible. But now the world is not just intelligible, it is comprehensible. Comprehended. Commendable.
“I am one of you!” I clap my hands with delight, pinching the cheek of a leather-faced imp wearing a mask of trepidation. “I see you! I hear you! I understand you!”
I survey the room from the top of the carved stone stairs at the entrance to the cavern. Where once I would have seen a sea of identical faces staring back at me, I now saw individuals as clear and distinct as leaves on a tree. How have I not noticed pattern and repetition and shape of them? The veins that define them, the unique marks and branches that form them?
As I descend the steps, the crowd parts before me like the Red Sea before Moses, opening up a path straight from my feet to the figure at the other end of the cavern, sitting on a throne of antlers upon a marble dais. He lounges upon that enormous chair, inky swirls of black staining his skin, a pair of ram’s horns jutting from his brow. His eyes are pale, the blue-white of blizzards and icy death.
Der Erlk?nig.
A host of ghostly warriors flank him on either side of the throne, wights and geists and spectral horsemen, dressed in rotting scraps of flesh and fabric, holding spears and shields rusted with age and disuse. The Wild Hunt.