Wintersong (Wintersong #1)(27)

“Have you—have you met Der Erlk?nig?” I asked.

It was a long moment before she replied. “Yes,” she said. “You are not the only maiden to have had foolish, girlish dreams of Der Erlk?nig, you know. You are not the only one to have danced with him in the wood. Like you, I once dreamed he would take me away, to be his bride in the Underground.” She looked away. “But he never did. Perhaps,” she said sardonically, “I was not pretty enough for him either.”

Sympathy beat in my chest for Constanze. Unlike K?the, unlike Mother, Constanze understood what it was to be plain, overlooked, ignored. K?the’s and Mother’s beauty ensured they would never be forgotten; their stories would live on in someone else’s narrative, as beautiful women always did. People would remember their names. Women like Constanze and me were relegated to the footnotes, to the background, nameless and unimportant.

“What happened?” I asked softly.

She shrugged. “I grew up.”

“All children do,” I said. “And yet, you still believe.”

Constanze returned my gaze with a long, hard stare. Then she gestured to the footstool beside her with a nod. I came and knelt at her feet, just as I had when I was young.

“I believe because I must,” she said. “Lest the consequences prove disastrous.”

“What consequences?”

It was a long while before Constanze spoke.

“You don’t know,” she croaked. “You could never know what the world was like when Der Erlk?nig and his subjects walked among us. It was a dark age, an age before reason, enlightenment, and God.”

I resisted the urge to ask how she knew. Constanze was old, but not that old. Instead, I let myself be young again in her presence, to settle into the rhythms and cadences of her story, lulled by the rise and fall of her speech.

“It was an age of blood, violence, and war,” she continued, “a time when man and goblin fought—over land, over water, over flesh. Beautiful flesh, sweet and tempting, the flesh of maidens, full of light and life. The goblins saw them as sustenance, men saw them as otherwise.”

Pointed teeth over razor-thin lips. I shuddered, remembering how juice from the enchanted peach had flowed over K?the’s mouth and throat like blood.

“Blood spilled as easily as rain, soaking the land, salting the earth, turning it red beneath our feet with the remains of the dead, burying the harvest beneath rage, grief, and sorrow. Der Erlk?nig heard the cries of the land, stifled by death and war, and stretched out his hands. In his right, he gathered Man; in his left, the goblins, dividing one from the other. And so, Der Erlk?nig has ever stood between us and them, between the world of the living and the dead, the ordinary and the uncanny.”

“How lonely,” I murmured. I thought of the tall, elegant stranger in the marketplace, the first guise in which the Goblin King had shown himself to me, more man than myth. Even then, he had stood alone and apart, and his loneliness called to my own. My cheeks flushed with the memory.

Constanze gave me a sharp glance. “Lonely, yes. But does the king serve the crown, or the crown serve the king?”

We sat in silence.

“How then, Constanze,” I said at last, “do I gain entrance to the Underground?”

For a long moment, I was afraid my grandmother would not give me a straight answer. Then she sighed.

“Der Erlk?nig is bound by an ancient sacrifice,” she said, “so we honor him with our own.”

“A sacrifice?”

Her eyes softened. “An offering,” she amended. “When I was a girl, we used to leave bread and milk as a tithe, a portion of our hard-earned work. But these are not the lean times they were when I was young. You must bring the Goblin King an offering that costs you something; after all, is that not the meaning of sacrifice?”

“I don’t have anything,” I said. “Only people. And I’ve already sacrificed one I love to Der Erlk?nig, Constanze; I’ll not risk any more.”

“Do you truly have nothing?” There was something in the tone of my grandmother’s voice that chilled my blood.

“Nothing,” I repeated, but my voice was less sure than before.

“Oh, but I think you do.” Her words were soft, sinister. “Something you love more than your sister, more than Josef, more than life itself.”

My mind did not comprehend her meaning, but my body knew. My body was cleverer than I. It went cold, and then numb with stillness.

My music.

I would have to sacrifice my music.





SACRIFICE




I should have known it would come to this.

As dusk began to fall outside, I knelt before the bed—the bed my sister and I had shared our entire lives—and reached for the lockbox I knew would be hidden there. My fingers scraped and searched, but stopped when they brushed over something smooth and polished.

The elegant stranger’s gift.

I had all but forgotten about it since we returned from the market that fateful day K?the had taken that bite of goblin fruit.

I do not offer this gift to you out of the goodness of my heart, but out of a selfish need to see what you might do with it.

And what had I done with the Goblin King’s gift? I had taken it and hidden it away, like it was something secret, something shameful. Perhaps my lack of faith had cost me everything after all.