The Kingdom of Back(62)

I took the powder in my hands and rubbed it against the door’s chain.

Nothing happened at first. Then I saw the lock start to melt, the rusted metal turning into thick globs of liquid. It pooled at my feet in a bronze puddle. I pushed against the door as hard as I could.

The nearest creature reached out now and grabbed for me. I felt its bones close around my foot. A scream burst from my throat. I kicked out at it, forcing it to loosen its hold.

“Hyacinth!” I cried, and pressed both of my hands against the rotting wood of the door and gave it another mighty heave.

It swung open. I fell into a room with a floor layered in straw.

A worn clavier sat in one corner of the room. The scarlet sky peeked through a tiny window. And in front of me, curled in a ball in the center of the room, stirred a young girl who looked very much like myself, her hair in the same loose, dark waves as mine, her eyes the color of a midnight lake. Even her dress, a simple thing of white and blue, reminded me of the dress I’d worn when I first played for Herr Schachtner, on a day so long ago.

She sat up to look at me in horror.

“You have slain the river guardian,” she whispered at me. “You have cut through the thorns my father erected.”

The river guardian? But the thorns were not there because of the late king. Were they? I opened my mouth to tell her this, but no words came out.

I turned around at a sound behind me, sure it was the creatures on the stairs. But it was Hyacinth, his white skin still glistening wet from the river, his eyes narrow and pulsing as if freed of an ancient thirst.

The girl’s eyes skipped to him. She shrank away. “You helped him across,” she whispered at me.

And only then, as she met my stare, did the truth flash through my mind as surely as if she had sent the thought to me.

The familiarity of the sun symbol on the flags and the tapestries of the royal family. I recognized it because it had been emblazoned on the shield in the ogre’s house.

The queen’s high cheekbones had been the same cheekbones of the faery trapped in the grotto. The queen’s white-and-gold dress had been the same white gown clinging tattered against the faery’s slender figure, draping down to where her feet were molded into the grotto floor. Even her magic, what Hyacinth had called her terrible power of fire, was a gift from the Sun, who had cherished her.

The Queen of the Night was not a wicked witch, but the queen herself. The ogre in the clearing had not been an ogre at all, but the king’s champion, who had failed to find the queen and her son.

And Hyacinth . . . I thought of the river monster that guarded against him, the bundles of dead grasses tied all along the castle’s gates. They were the same grasses Hyacinth couldn’t touch in the clearing with the arrow, the same that were poisonous to him. The grass was protection for the castle, meant to keep him out.

Hyacinth was never the princeling of the kingdom, the queen’s missing son. He was the faery creature that had stolen the boy, the monster that the kingdom had tried to keep out.

I let out a cry. My arms came up to shield the girl. But Hyacinth leapt past me. And as I looked on, he lunged at the princess and devoured her.





LETTERS FROM A MIDNIGHT WOOD



I woke with a start.

The morning had not yet ripened, and shadows still lingered behind the bedroom door and windowsill. My hands were outstretched before me, reaching blindly out to where I thought Hyacinth stood. My lips were parted in a silent scream and my eyes were still wide at the sight of his bloodstained teeth.

When my dream world at last gave way to the real one, I realized that Hyacinth was nothing more than my bedpost. I looked quickly to where Woferl slept, certain that I had stirred him, but he did not move, and his breathing stayed even.

A deep cold had settled into my bones, and I was shaking so hard that I could barely press my hands together. Something terrible had happened in the Kingdom of Back. Even as I fought to remember it, I felt the horror of the vision fading away, the sharp edges softening. The princess in the tower had my face, formed by my imagination. Had I even seen any of it? Hyacinth was my guardian, and surely that meant he could not have betrayed me.

But something seemed different about the haze in my mind this morning, like a hand had reached into my thoughts and stirred them, turning the clear waters murky. Like someone else had curled inside. I closed my eyes and let myself reach for the final moments of my dream. The queen. The champion. The princess.

Hyacinth was not the princeling of the Kingdom of Back. He had instead destroyed the kingdom, and I had been the one who’d helped him.

“Are you feeling well, Nannerl?”

I jumped at Woferl’s voice. When I looked at him, his eyes were staring, unblinking, back at me. “I did not mean to wake you,” I answered.

“I had a strange dream,” Woferl said.

A thread of fear coiled through me and tightened. “What happened in it?” I asked.

“I was in a city. It was burning to the ground; the fire nipped at my skin and the smoke blinded my eyes.”

“A city? Lille?”

“No.” His voice was flat. “A city with no name.”

It was Hyacinth’s doing, this dream of his. I could feel his presence in the spaces between my brother’s words, teeth sinking into the air. I waited for Woferl to speak again. When he just rolled away and closed his eyes, I turned on my side and stared at the strengthening light peeking in from the window.