The Kingdom of Back(46)
When he finally pulled away, I swayed in place, unable to speak for a moment. My fingers came up to brush against my lips. They tingled, cold to the touch.
“Why,” I whispered at last, “did the valley speak to me?”
His smile wavered. “What did it say?”
I repeated for him what I’d heard. You are the one who poisons the land. You are not meant to be in the kingdom.
He shivered at the words, turning his face away from me as if in great pain. The glow of his eyes reflected blue soft against his cheeks. Around him, faeries came to comfort him and caress his face. “This place yearns to keep us out,” he murmured, casting a glance toward the arching bridge. “Come, Nannerl, let us leave this behind.” And before I could ask him anything more about it, he took my hand and began to lead me back the way we’d come.
THE CHTEAU
In the morning, Hyacinth was nowhere to be seen.
The light beaming into our room had no quaver of the unusual. But the dream of the kingdom seemed startlingly real today. Perhaps it was the memory of Hyacinth’s cool hands against my face, pulling me in toward him. The ice of his kiss lingered, so that when I brought a finger up to run along my lips, my skin still felt cool to the touch.
I lay there for a moment, unmoving, trying to remember all the details. Something in my heart felt strangely light and empty. What would happen now? What would Hyacinth do next?
A sudden impulse gripped me and I looked to where Woferl lay at my side. He slept soundly, his small body curled into a ball underneath the blankets. A soft murmur came from his lips. I watched him, noting the flush of his cheeks. When I reached out to touch his forehead, his skin was burning with heat.
* * *
For two weeks, a fever wracked Woferl’s body. Every evening, he tossed and turned, his brow beaded with sweat, murmuring deliriously until he’d finally fall into a troubled sleep.
Mama blamed the sickness on the fact that Papa had worked us so relentlessly for the past few weeks. Papa blamed it on the cold and the wet air. I sat at Woferl’s bedside and watched him quietly. My thoughts dwelled on how my brother had looked when stricken with scarlet fever, how I’d told him the story of the castle and then imagined the shadows floating around his chamber.
The tasks I’d completed for Hyacinth stayed with me. I thought through each one as I watched my brother grimace in his sleep, dark circles bruising the skin under his eyes. Surely it was all a coincidence, the way Woferl’s illnesses seemed to line up with these vivid dreams I had.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that his illnesses were linked to the kingdom and to my tasks there. It felt as if my brother’s fate and the princeling’s and mine were all tethered together as tightly as a violin string. Woferl’s hot hand pressed against mine. I held on to him and stared at his pitiful figure, his eyes dancing under their lids. His lips moved silently. Now and then, they seemed to form Hyacinth’s name, as if his essence was hanging somewhere in the air. But I heard nothing.
Was my brother dreaming of the princeling? Was Hyacinth visiting with him secretly?
A spark of envy burned in my heart, followed immediately by guilt.
If I were the one lying sick here, I knew my brother wouldn’t hesitate to stay by my side every evening, humming to me little tunes that he’d written, kissing my cheeks, and asking me to grow stronger. He wouldn’t sit in silence and allow jealousy to invade his mind. The realization made me tighten my grip on his hand.
Would it change what I did for Hyacinth, if I knew that the link between all our fates were real? I lowered my eyes, ashamed that I didn’t know the answer right away. He was so small for his age, his body so vulnerable. I thought of all the times he would curl close to me for protection, and my heart softened in affection. I lowered my face to his and whispered for him to get well.
Night after night, I returned to hold Woferl’s hand and watch the shadows dance across his face. I stayed until, slowly, slowly, he began to pull out of the darkness. The fog disappeared from his eyes. He began to look alert again. He would wake up in the morning and ask for parchment and ink.
The arguments between my mother and father stopped. My worries about the kingdom’s effect on Woferl’s health faded away again. And all of us breathed a collective sigh of relief.
* * *
I believe that Papa must have felt some regret for his behavior during this time. He had worked Woferl and me relentlessly for weeks, making us go over and over our pieces, watching us practice late into the nights even when Woferl shivered from the cold. His outburst at me over Johann seemed to guilt him too. While we waited for Woferl to recover, he told me that our audiences felt compelled to speak to me, that I was an alluring talent. Sometimes he fumbled over his words, grew frustrated with himself, and turned his eyes away from me.
I don’t know if it had anything to do with me witnessing him at his writing desk weeks ago, or if my task for Hyacinth had pleased the princeling enough to earn me a bit of luck.
Whatever the reason, after Woferl recovered from the fever, Papa decided to give us a day of reprieve shortly after we arrived in France, taking us to visit La Roche-Guyon with no performances planned.
La Roche-Guyon was a small commune in the northern part of the country. The La Rochefoucauld family had invited us to visit their chateau, and Papa never missed a chance to develop new relations with nobility. He lined me up with my brother on the day we were to meet them and warned us not to mention where we would next visit, that the last leg of our journey would take us to Great Britain.