The Kingdom of Back(30)

The instant we plunged into the pool, I lost my grip on the night flower. Woferl saw it happen and grabbed it. We swam away from the grotto and out through the crevice, where we could no longer hear the witch’s cries. We swam away from the rocks, back toward where the deep blue ocean became shallow and hugged the edges of the beach’s white sands, away from the cave of night flowers.

Hyacinth was standing exactly where we had last seen him. I trembled as he approached us. Water dripped from my eyes and down my face. Woferl shivered beside me, clutching the flower to his chest. When the princeling saw the night flower in my brother’s hands, his eyes lit up and he let out a laugh of joy.

“Splendid!” he exclaimed. He gingerly took the night flower from Woferl’s hands, then patted my brother’s cheeks twice in affection. “You’ve done very well.”

Woferl beamed, pleased at his praise, and wrapped his arms around himself with pride.

“Why do you need the flower?” I asked Hyacinth.

He glanced at me, then leaned down very close and kissed my cheek. His smile was sweet and grateful. “It is part of what I need to reclaim my throne in this kingdom,” he replied. “Soon you will see.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

But Hyacinth had already turned away and motioned for us to follow him back into the woods. I looked down at Woferl again. He seemed tired, and his long lashes dripped water. A bright spot of blood pooled on his thumb. He had pricked his finger on the flower’s thorns.



* * *





    I woke with a start. Gone were the ocean and the faery queen and the night flower. Gone was the princeling. I was lying in my own bed with Woferl breathing gently next to me, his eyes quivering ever so slightly underneath his lids. He had one of his thumbs in his mouth, a habit that returned whenever he dreamed. I stared at the ceiling.

A dream. The words echoed in my mind. But it had all felt so vibrant. The shore had been so white, the shells so blue, the water so warm. The witch’s eyes so dark. Still, it must have been a dream. Had to have been. What had Hyacinth said he needed the flower for? I couldn’t remember. Nor could I think of what we had done after we surfaced again. Hyacinth had praised us, hadn’t he?

I looked at Woferl again, then gently pulled his thumb out of his mouth. There, along the top of the tender flesh, was a small cut and a drop of blood. He must have bitten his thumb a little too hard during the night, I thought.

But the vision of the night flower’s thorns and Hyacinth’s smile had not yet faded away. I continued to stare at my brother until the room began to blur again, until this time I sank into a dreamless sleep.





THE CASTLE ON THE HILL



Woferl seemed quieter than usual the next morning. He lay in bed beside me, round cheeks flushed, sleep still glazing his eyes, and listened without a word as I told him about my dream.

“We went together to the white sand beach,” I said. “We saw the Queen of the Night, a witch trapped in an underwater grotto there. She was very frightening.”

Woferl murmured his astonishment as I told him about how we escaped from the grotto and ended up giving the night flower to Hyacinth. But his wonder felt muted, his attention scattered. The glaze in his eyes gave them a feverish shine.

“Are you all right, Woferl?” I asked when I finished my story.

He shrugged and curled up tighter in bed. I glimpsed a tiny scar on his thumb from where he’d bitten it in his sleep. “My throat is just a little dry,” he said, and dozed off again.

Papa always left early and did not come back until later in the day, when Woferl switched from practicing on his violin to the clavier. So the morning hours were mine, a time when I could play without being disturbed, when no one came in to check on my progress or how many times I had run flawlessly through a menuett.

Mama was out, so the only person with me this morning was Woferl. Now that he knew about my composition, and had managed to keep it from Papa, I felt safer with him nearby, someone with whom I could share the burden of a secret. He sat with me on the clavier’s bench, his elbows propped up on the keys, watching intently as I played my scale.

After I paused to turn to a different piece in my notebook, he said to me, quite abruptly, “I wish you would write more music.”

I stopped to look at him.

Woferl flipped to the second to last page of my notebook, and pointed out the few measures I’d written. “You never finished this one,” he said.

All I could hear was my father’s voice in my head, and the words he’d spoken to Mama over dinner yesterday. Nannerl makes an excellent companion for Woferl. Together their fame is twice what it could be. Can you imagine the spectacle we could create if one day Nannerl performed one of Woferl’s compositions?

Mama had listened and nodded. Of course, it would be preposterous to suggest that I could compose my own pieces.

In truth, I was an excellent companion. But I would be nothing more than a performer for my brother’s compositions. If I wanted immortality, it would not come from my writing. The words hung weighted around my neck. Composition was for men. It was an obvious rule. What would others think of my father if they knew I composed behind his back? That he could not even control his own daughter? What kind of girl shamed her father by secretly doing a man’s work?

The image of my compositions burning in the fire flashed before me, the thought of my father’s stern eyes . . . I had seen Papa toss letters in a rage into the stove, remembered watching the embers light the edges of those papers. The memory made me wince. Even seeing my little tune exposed here on the page was making my heart quicken. I glanced nervously toward the door, half expecting Papa to step in at this very moment, and then turned to a different menuett.