The Kingdom of Back(48)

“Nannerl!” his small voice called back down to me. He sounded like a muted violin. “Hurry, won’t you?”

“Come back down immediately!” I shouted up to him.

“But Hyacinth told me I should come up here! Don’t you want to join me?”

I froze. Hyacinth had told him? Immediately, I thought back to the mornings when my brother would wake with a dazed look on his face, as if he’d had dreams he couldn’t explain. I remembered the way his eyes would dart about under their lids in his feverish sleep.

I looked up at the winding stairs. A faint presence of music hung in the air, reaching out from another world. A tremor shook through me, and suddenly I felt afraid. What had Hyacinth been telling him, that he had not told me?

“Woferl!” I called again, finding new strength in my fear.

The stairs continued on. Now and then, as I passed a window, I would catch a glimpse of the bottom of the hill and the moat and the river, and see patches of sky and sunlight. The scene was very familiar to me, and I began to slow down so that I could better see the view at the next window. My shoes rubbed against something slippery. When I looked down, I noticed that some of the steps were wet now, as if fresh from a rainstorm.

I climbed higher and higher. My breaths began to come in gasps, and yet still I could not hear Woferl answer my calls. My irritation grew. I told myself that I would not sit with him at practice tomorrow, to punish him, and that when he would ask me for help in his compositions, I would refuse. Woferl would not remember what he did to me, though. He would simply pout at me later, and ask why I did not care for him anymore.

I paused by a window to rest, careful not to sit on the wet parts of the stairs. Outside I could hear the wind in the trees and the sounds of the river, but they seemed distant too, as if everything in the world was far away from the stairs that I sat on. I gazed out the window, lost for a moment in my thoughts. A melody floated in the breeze and disappeared before I could fully grasp it.

That was when I first noticed it. The sky had grown a little darker, a scarlet tint to the clouds, and the rush of the river suddenly seemed very loud. The moat looked wider than I remembered. The window grew smaller, and I leaned back, suddenly afraid that it would close around my head.

Through the shrinking opening, I thought I saw a dark figure float around the base of the keep, shrouded in black tatters, and shapeless. My hands started to tremble.

The chateau no longer looked like a chateau at all. It had become the castle on the hill.

When I looked out the window again, I could see someone waiting on the other side of the river.

The water appeared dark now, its bottom indistinguishable from the murky depths, and strange shadows glided under its surface, fragments of a massive creature with a long tail.

The figure on the other side of the river was Hyacinth.

Even from here I could tell that he looked different. He had grown even taller, white bleeding into his skin like winter stripping the color from a tree, and his glowing blue eyes fixed on me with such intensity that I drew back from the window to catch my breath. When I shifted, my foot brushed past a cluster of edelweiss growing at the base of one step.

I looked back up the stairs. The flowers had appeared everywhere, surrounded by sprouts of grass. I swallowed hard. “Woferl,” I whispered, knowing that he could not hear me.

Something called my name from outside the window. “Fr?ulein. Fr?ulein.”

It was Hyacinth and his sweet, wild, savage voice. The kiss on my lips turned cold again. I trembled and did not reply, although a part of me yearned hungrily for his presence.

“My darling Fr?ulein,” he said. “It is time. We have done what we needed. Now, you must use the treasures you have fetched for me.”

My breaths had turned very rapid, and when I looked back out through the window, I could see his arm extended out in my direction. He was too far away for me to see his features, but I knew he was smiling.

“You never told me you were talking to Woferl,” I finally said.

He shook his head. “I do not speak alone to your brother,” he replied.

A lie, I thought. I could hear it in the air. “What are you telling him? What do you want with him?”

Hyacinth tilted his head at me. “What’s this? Are you questioning me?” He laughed a little and opened his arms. “I am your guardian, as I always have been. Come now. Our next task approaches. I must take the next step in helping you achieve your immortality.”

I watched him, wary, unsure of everything. Perhaps Woferl is the one teasing me, lying to me about Hyacinth. “What is the next task?” I decided to ask.

Hyacinth nodded toward the giant creature swimming through the river, its fins black and gleaming. “The river that surrounds my castle has been poisoned by a monster that now patrols its depths. The golden arrow you retrieved for me is the only weapon capable of penetrating its scales.”

The crossbow I had taken from within the rock pillars was already in my hands. The events of the night came back to me in a rush.

“How do you know this?” I whispered, clutching the crossbow’s handle until my knuckles turned white.

“Because,” Hyacinth replied, fear in his voice, “it has struck me before.”

And when I looked back at the arrow notched in the weapon I noticed the blood on its tip, black and dried.

Down in the river below, the monster spun and its fins flipped, roiling the water. My brother called for me from somewhere far away.