The Kingdom of Back(82)

“You are in a castle where you don’t belong,” the queen said to Hyacinth. As she spoke, the castle stirred and sighed beneath its ivy-choked walls and soot-stained paths, as if remembering its mistress’s voice. “Go back to the woods and torment us no more.”

Hyacinth sneered at her, but already the castle was changing, revitalized by the magic of her warm presence, and as Hyacinth stood there, the thorns and ivy that had started to choke the courtyard walls began to crumple away. I heard the echo of laughter from long ago, the merry voices of villagers who had once strolled this place.

Hyacinth’s smile reappeared. To my horror, his eyes were shifting . . . molding into something that looked surprisingly like my own eyes. “Little noble lady,” he taunted. “So abruptly changed. But it is too late for you. You have made your choice, and you have decided to be forgotten.”

This was a final lie. It was not too late yet.

Beside me, the queen lifted her glowing hands. Hyacinth shrank back in terror. His faeries darted away in a uniform wave.

“You’re afraid of the light,” I said to him. “Of warmth. Fire. Life.”

“You will not do it,” he said. His voice had turned into a whimper now as he looked between the queen and me. “You know I am your only chance to fulfill your wish. We have always helped each other, Fr?ulein. If you turn away from me now, there is no coming back.”

“I’ve had enough of your temptations,” I replied. “You are not the guardian of my destiny. I have already found my own way. You will not take my brother, and you will not steal me away to die.”

“Everyone dies,” Hyacinth said. He laughed, a high, nervous sound. “But not everyone, my darling, will be remembered.”

I thought of what I’d written, the sonatas published under my brother’s name. I thought of our oratorio, the measures of my own that I had kept. I thought of my brother’s wide, admiring eyes, the way he would imitate my style, my composition, my music. I thought of his last words to me, his small voice, his hand in mine. It was my wish, in a form I could only now recognize.

All I’ve ever wanted was to be like you.

Perhaps I would never be remembered in the same way as my brother. Perhaps, in the world’s eyes, I would never be what I wanted to be. Perhaps the only one who would ever hold me in his heart would be Woferl. But when I was gone, my work would survive, immortalized on paper, embedded in my brother’s mind. Locked away inside me, carried on through him. No one could take that piece of my soul away.

“What you offer me,” I replied, “I have already achieved.”

Hyacinth lunged toward me. The queen stepped forward, her arms outstretched, to protect me. The glow of her hands flashed a brilliant golden light, as bright as the Sun itself—and all at once, the entire castle seemed drenched in heat. Fire engulfed the dark grass near my feet, eating it away in great gulps. The queen lifted her arms to the sky, and the flames before us surged at her beckoning.

Hyacinth shrieked in anger and fear. Fire raced in a ring around me and swallowed the crooked black trees, the winding path, the vines and ivy and leaves, the clusters of mushrooms. It devoured the faeries in its path, the ivy staining the walls, the soot-charred stones. It devoured the ghosts of the past and the weight of the air. It fed on the dead silence of the castle, filling it instead with the roar of flames.

Hyacinth tried to run. He leapt over one column of fire, then another. For a moment, I thought that perhaps we would not be able to trap him at all, that he would end up escaping still into the woods, until the next time a poor fool crossed his path and he decided to use their lives for his pleasure.

Then the flames caught his arm. Hyacinth yelped, dancing in agonized fury amidst the flames and burning trees. His skin melted in the heat. His screams grew higher and higher. I watched as the flames ate away at his figure until he was no longer a tall, foreboding figure, not even the shy and mischievous boy I’d first seen so long ago, his eyes large with fear and his wide mouth twisted into a smile. He danced as he died, his body a column of fire raging in unison with everything around him.

Fr?ulein! he called to me as he went. Help me!

And even now, in spite of everything, I could feel the pull of his presence against my heart. But the queen and I watched in silence, until that pull weakened and weakened into nothing.

Then the fire engulfed him, and he at last turned to ash.

Before us was an empty castle, cleansed of its poison, drenched in light. The strange music that had always permeated the kingdom, the wind of Hyacinth’s whispers, was gone now. In its place lingered something different. A sound as sweet as the earth, made not of magic but of something real and warm and alive. The music of a heart.

In the sky, the moons had begun to set. For the first time, I saw the beginning of a glow at the horizon, the first hour of dawn before sunrise. I stood transfixed by the pink streaking the sky.

The queen finally turned to me, her eyes steady again. She was no longer a cursed witch, but a human, her faded wings now transformed into her velvet cloak.

I didn’t know what to say to her. What could I? I had let her stay trapped in her prison for so long. But when I couldn’t speak, she did.

“Now I am free,” she said. “And so will you be.”

I didn’t answer. I would return to my world, where Woferl would publish music and I would not. Where my future had already been laid out before me, a path that I could not hope to change.