Shadowsong (Wintersong #2)(91)

“How . . .” I trail off.

He laughs softly. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“I really do wish He would be a little less mysterious and a lot more forthcoming,” I say irritably. The Goblin King chuckles.

“You gave me a name,” Josef says. My brother’s smile is tender and sweet, and I do not think I can bear the pain. “Now give him his.”

He takes my hand and places it in the Goblin King’s. My austere young man. My—

“Wolfgang,” I whisper.

Josef returns my candle to me, lit not with the fire from my altar, but from the marsh light in his own chest. His soul, my soul. I reach forward and light the candle in the Goblin King’s chest.

The shadows fall away.

“Go,” Josef says, and he points toward a window, where a girl with sunshine hair and summer-blue eyes stands with palms outstretched, waiting to take me by the hand.

“K?the,” I murmur.

Behind my sister stands Fran?ois. My brother and his beloved lock eyes. What is said in that long, quiet gaze is unknown to me, for although theirs is a language of love, it is not the language I speak. After a moment, Fran?ois nods. It is not a nod of resignation or defeat, but of acceptance. Of farewell. Josef nods his head in return.

“Go,” my brother repeats. “Go, and play your music for the world. Be the self you are meant to be, Liesl, just as I am the king I choose to be.”

“But how can I play without you?” I don’t bother to wipe away the tears streaming down my cheeks.

“You have him,” he says, tilting his head toward the Goblin King. Toward Wolfgang. “But you will always have me too. Your music is a bridge, Liesl,” he says. “Play it, and we shall always be together. Play it, and I shall always remember. You. Life. What it means to love. For your music was the first and only thing in this world that kept me human, the first and last thing I give back to you.”

I am crying so hard I can barely speak. “I love you, Sepperl.” Great, heaving sobs, and I cannot breathe, cannot gulp enough air to say this last goodbye. “I love you, mein Brüderchen. With my whole heart.”

Josef smiles, and the tips of his teeth gleam in the flickering candlelight. “And I love you, Liesl,” he says softly. “With the world entire.”





a baby cries in a cradle before stopping, the red fading from its overflushed cheeks.

It grows very still, pale, and wan.

Josef?

A little girl walks into the room. She is sallow-skinned and skinny, with dark hair and eyes that seem to take over her entire face. She leans over the cradle and touches her brother’s cheek.

The baby opens its eyes. They are a flat black. Goblin’s eyes. Changeling eyes.

Sepperl?

There is worry in her voice, and love. At the sound, the black in the baby’s eyes dwindles, and a pale blue appears in its place. It reaches out a tiny hand to the little girl, who holds it tightly in her own. The little girl begins to sing. A lullaby, a melody of her own making. It moves something within him, something new, something different, something marvelous.

A memory.

His memory. The first he could truly call his own, for it did not belong to the Underground, or to Liesl, or to anyone but himself.

Der Erlk?nig.

In the distance, music plays. It is the sound of his sister’s voice, reaching across the veil between worlds. And as he had done when he was a baby in a cradle, Josef reaches back.

Their souls touch, and it is a bridge. He had a name. He had a soul. He had grace.

Der Erlk?nig remembers what it is to love.

And brings the world back to life.





To Anna Katharina Magdalena Ingeborg Vogler

Care of the Faithful

Vienna

My darling K?the,

We have arrived safe and sound back in Bavaria with Mother and Constanze. Despite our fears, the inn has prospered without us, a steady flow of business filling our coffers instead of Papa’s debts. Our grandmother is as irritable and irascible as ever, although she did rouse herself from her quarters to greet Wolfgang. Like everyone else we’ve met on this journey back to the Goblin Grove, she is relentlessly charmed by him, although she would furiously deny it if asked.

“Where did you find such a young man?” she demanded. “How was such a small, plain little thing like you able to ensorcell him into marriage?”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” was Wolfgang’s reply, an answer that endeared him to Mother’s churchgoing sensibilities, but unfortunately distanced him from Constanze’s rather heretical ones.

“Pah,” she said. “He is not one of Der Erlk?nig’s own, I see.”

“Alas, no,” he replied. “I am my own, I’m afraid.”

Everyone looked at me as though I were mad as I laughed and laughed and laughed.

Our small, provincial village was just as shocked as Constanze to find me returned with a husband, and perhaps none more so than Herr Baumg?rtner. I confess to feeling a measure of petty satisfaction to note how much more handsome than Hans my Wolfgang is, even as I know that is beneath me. I give you permission to tease me about it later, K?the. I know.

I paid our respects to Papa’s grave in the old church cemetery. The old rector is gone, vanished from his bed last winter with nothing but poppies left in his wake. I noted another headstone beside our father’s as we left, new to me, but old and weathered as though it had been there for years.