The Kingdom of Back(17)

“We should give the kingdom a name,” Woferl announced. I shoved him, glancing pointedly over to our sleeping father. “A name,” he repeated in a whisper.

“All right. A name. What do you want to call it?”

Woferl closed his eyes. I watched his sun-soaked lashes resting against his cheeks and wondered for a moment if he had fallen asleep. Then he opened his eyes and flashed a grin at me. “Let’s call it the Kingdom of Back,” he declared.

“What a curious name,” I whispered. “Why?”

Woferl looked pleased with himself. “Because it’s all backward, isn’t it?” he replied. “The trees turned on their heads, the moons where there should be sun.”

Now he was turning playful from restlessness. “And does that mean the people are backward there too?” I teased him. Here, in our sunlit carriage, the kingdom seemed just a figment of our dreams, Hyacinth a fleeting memory. “Were we backward?”

He giggled. “Everyone is backward.” At that, he offered me a mock frown, an imitation of a backward smile, and tried to flip the syllables in his name. It sounded so garbled that I covered my mouth, trying to stifle my laughter.

He shifted in the carriage seat toward the window. “Backward,” he repeated to himself. “I’m going to put that into my concerto.”

“Are you going to write it down when we reach Vienna?”

“Yes.”

“The whole concerto?”

“I am almost finished with the first movement.”

I shook my head gently at him, disbelieving, then patted his knee. “Surely you can’t remember all of that. I would not be able to hold such a long piece in my head.”

Woferl simply shrugged. “I can.” Then he uttered a contented sigh and rested his head against my shoulder. As he did, he hummed under his breath, so softly that I could barely hear him. But I did. And this time, the sound struck deep within me. I recognized the kingdom in his melody—at once sweet and beautiful, newly formed, in a minor key that made it sound like a place that could never quite settle.

At first, I heard echoes of Papa’s rigid teaching. But I could also recognize the parts that my brother drew from my own playing, the pauses and crescendos in his measures. I could make out the way he was turning my inspiration, the sound of my yearning, into his own. How, in a way, he was taking what I could do and improving upon it.

How silly I was for thinking, even for a moment, that Woferl could not create something beautiful enough for the kingdom. I closed my eyes, dizzy, envious, wanting more. This was not the composition of a child. Within it was the wisdom of an old soul, not the innocence of a young boy. No child could create a piece like this and keep it all in his mind.

And as I thought this, as I listened in awe to my brother’s raw concerto, the memory of Hyacinth came to me in such a strong wave that I opened my eyes, shivering, certain he would be sitting in the carriage with us.

But he was not there. Papa still sat across from us, dozing with his chin resting against his hand, while Mama leaned against his shoulder, swaying in her sleep. Still, I felt the ripple of something strange in the air, the heady sensation of a new presence. Through the window, something pale flashed by among the trees. A glimpse of glowing eyes.

In an instant, the kingdom and the princeling no longer felt like a faraway dream. They were very real, and they were here.

Suddenly, the carriage lurched to one side. Mama gasped. Papa startled awake with a curse on his tongue. I cried out—my hands flew to the carriage wall to keep myself from falling forward. Our trunks clattered free of their ties and careened out of the boot, landing with a crash in the dirt path outside. We settled to a halt in a cloud of dust.

Papa was first up on his feet. He scrambled against the slanted floor until he could pull himself out of the suspended door, then reached over to hoist my mother out.

I grabbed Woferl’s hand. He was crying. He rubbed at his head, and between his fingers I could see a pink mark growing from where he’d hit his forehead against the edge of the carriage window. When I called for him, he reached obediently for me, and I lifted him around to Papa’s outstretched hands. Together, we helped him make his way up. I went last.

We found ourselves at the edge of a forest dense with oak and spruce, its canopy so thick that hardly any light reached its floor. I peered around for a moment, blinking dust out of my eyes. The road we’d traveled wound in a slender arc, its bordering trees trailing off into mist, and ahead of us stretched more of the same. In the middle of the road lay one of our carriage’s wheels, which had somehow come completely off its axle. Faint lines carved in the dirt curved up the path from where the carriage had passed.

I trembled. My eyes searched for a lithe figure crouching in the trees.

While Papa retrieved the wheel and helped the coachman lift the carriage enough to replace it, I studied the tangle of trees surrounding us, looking up on an impulse into the thickness of their leaves. Beside me, Woferl bent down to pick something out of the dirt.

“Nannerl, look,” he said, holding an object out to me. When I peered closer, I saw a blue rock in his hand, glowing faintly as if lit from within, its grooves striped and strange like a seashell’s. I turned my attention to the other rocks strewn across the path, and when I did, I noticed that hidden underneath their coats of dust were glimpses of bright blue, an entire spread of shining, sharp fragments that had jolted our travels to a full stop. At first glance, they looked strewn in a random pattern, careless stones clumped with twigs and fallen leaves.