The Kingdom of Back

by Marie Lu

  “Nannerl,” he said, “this will be a long trip. I’ll need you to keep your wits about you and conduct yourself like a young lady. Do you understand?”

  I nodded quietly.

  Papa’s gaze flickered over my shoulder toward the carriage. “Woferl’s health has been delicate lately. All this winter air.” I nodded again. My father did not need to tell me. I had always known this about my brother. “Two weeks in the carriage may wear him down. Take care that he does not catch a chill. The emperor specifically requested his presence, and if we are to perform again in Europe, we will need Woferl’s reputation to precede us.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “Be mindful of your brother.”

  I waited for him to tell me to take care, too, but he did not. My hands brushed at the edges of my petticoat. Specks of dirt had spoiled the fabric’s light color. “I will, Papa.”

  He removed his hand. His expression changed, and he started to move away. “The coach is almost ready. Come along, Nannerl.”

  As I headed after my father, I watched Woferl pull Mama’s arm down toward him. I could not hear him, but his words coaxed a tear from her eyes, and she gathered him into her arms.

  Years later, I learned that Woferl had asked, Mama, will you be sad when I grow up?

  * * *

  We traveled along the upper rim of the Alps, where the terrain changed to gently rolling hills and patches of forest. Papa and Mama chatted together on one side of the carriage, while I sat with Woferl on the other. The ride was so bumpy that I had to press him against the carriage wall to keep him from sliding around.

  While our parents dozed, I spent my time looking at the ever-changing landscape. The houses had grown sparse, and the sun shifted in the sky so that it peeked in just below the carriage window, bathing us in light. I smiled at the warmth, leaned closer, and narrowed my eyes. The passing hillsides transformed into a stream of colors, gold and peach and orange, hazy layers of billowing silk. Tree trunks blurred by.

  Beside me, Woferl’s eyes were half closed, and his lashes glowed white in the sunlight. His slender little fingers danced, composing in the same way I’d seen him that morning with Papa’s violin.

  “What are you thinking, Woferl?” I asked in a soft voice.

  He opened his eyes. “I am writing a concerto,” he whispered.

  I nudged him affectionately with one elbow. “How are you writing a concerto, silly, with no paper?”

  “I can write it down in my head and remember it.” He rolled his eyes upward, thinking, then looked at me again. “I am imagining the kingdom.”

  His mention of the fantasy otherworld sent a familiar thrill through me. Woferl had, for months after the incident at the trinket shop, asked me exactly what I’d seen that day. I’d told him about the clavier and the notebook, the grotto and the princeling. All I’d left out was the conversation between Hyacinth and me. It had seemed like a secret meant for no one else.

  “Are you, now?” I said. “What does a concerto about the kingdom sound like?”

  He turned his large eyes on me. “You want to hear it?” he asked eagerly.

  I hesitated for the space of a breath. “Of course,” I replied.

  He cleared his throat and hummed a few bars. It sounded light and airy, not like the perfect music from my dream or the grotto, but instead like the scenery we passed. Somehow, I felt relieved that it was so different. Perhaps the music from the otherworld was something only I truly understood. My mind returned for a moment to the moss-paved tunnel, Hyacinth’s bright eyes and polished fingernails. Now and then, I thought I could see an upside-down tree flash by our window, although I could never quite focus on it.

  “I like it,” I said to him when he fell silent again.

  “We should give the kingdom a name,” Woferl announced. I shoved him, glancing pointedly over to our sleeping father. “A name,” he repeated in a whisper.

  “All right. A name. What do you want to call it?”

  Woferl closed his eyes. I watched his sun-soaked lashes resting against his cheeks and wondered for a moment if he had fallen asleep. Then he opened his eyes and flashed a grin at me. “Let’s call it the Kingdom of Back,” he declared.

  “What a curious name,” I whispered. “Why?”

  Woferl looked pleased with himself. “Because it’s all backward, isn’t it?” he replied. “The trees turned on their heads, the moons where there should be sun.”

  Now he was turning playful from restlessness. “And does that mean the people are backward there too?” I teased him. Here, in our sunlit carriage, the kingdom seemed just a figment of our dreams, Hyacinth a fleeting memory. “Were we backward?”

  He giggled. “Everyone is backward.” At that, he offered me a mock frown, an imitation of a backward smile, and tried to flip the syllables in his name. It sounded so garbled that I covered my mouth, trying to stifle my laughter.

  He shifted in the carriage seat toward the window. “Backward,” he repeated to himself. “I’m going to put that into my concerto.”

  “Are you going to write it down when we reach Vienna?”

  “Yes.”

  “The whole concerto?”

  “I am almost finished with the first movement.”

  I shook my head gently at him, disbelieving, then patted his knee. “Surely you can’t remember all of that. I would not be able to hold such a long piece in my head.”

  Woferl simply shrugged. “I can.” Then he uttered a contented sigh and rested his head against my shoulder. As he did, he hummed under his breath, so softly that I could barely hear him. But I did. And this time, the sound struck deep within me. I recognized the kingdom in his melody—at once sweet and beautiful, newly formed, in a minor key that made it sound like a place that could never quite settle.

  At first, I heard echoes of Papa’s rigid teaching. But I could also recognize the parts that my brother drew from my own playing, the pauses and crescendos in his measures. I could make out the way he was turning my inspiration, the sound of my yearning, into his own. How, in a way, he was taking what I could do and improving upon it.

  How silly I was for thinking, even for a moment, that Woferl could not create something beautiful enough for the kingdom. I closed my eyes, dizzy, envious, wanting more. This was not the composition of a child. Within it was the wisdom of an old soul, not the innocence of a young boy. No child could create a piece like this and keep it all in his mind.

  And as I thought this, as I listened in awe to my brother’s raw concerto, the memory of Hyacinth came to me in such a strong wave that I opened my eyes, shivering, certain he would be sitting in the carriage with us.

  But he was not there. Papa still sat across from us, dozing with his chin resting against his hand, while Mama leaned against his shoulder, swaying in her sleep. Still, I felt the ripple of something strange in the air, the heady sensation of a new presence. Through the window, something pale flashed by among the trees. A glimpse of glowing eyes.

  In an instant, the kingdom and the princeling no longer felt like a faraway dream. They were very real, and they were here.

  Suddenly, the carriage lurched to one side. Mama gasped. Papa startled awake with a curse on his tongue. I cried out—my hands flew to the carriage wall to keep myself from falling forward. Our trunks clattered free of their ties and careened out of the boot, landing with a crash in the dirt path outside. We settled to a halt in a cloud of dust.

  Papa was first up on his feet. He scrambled against the slanted floor until he could pull himself out of the suspended door, then reached over to hoist my mother out.

  I grabbed Woferl’s hand. He was crying. He rubbed at his head, and between his fingers I could see a pink mark growing from where he’d hit his forehead against the edge of the carriage window. When I called for him, he reached obediently for me, and I lifted him around to Papa’s outstretched hands. Together, we helped him m
ake his way up. I went last.

  We found ourselves at the edge of a forest dense with oak and spruce, its canopy so thick that hardly any light reached its floor. I peered around for a moment, blinking dust out of my eyes. The road we’d traveled wound in a slender arc, its bordering trees trailing off into mist, and ahead of us stretched more of the same. In the middle of the road lay one of our carriage’s wheels, which had somehow come completely off its axle. Faint lines carved in the dirt curved up the path from where the carriage had passed.

  I trembled. My eyes searched for a lithe figure crouching in the trees.

  While Papa retrieved the wheel and helped the coachman lift the carriage enough to replace it, I studied the tangle of trees surrounding us, looking up on an impulse into the thickness of their leaves. Beside me, Woferl bent down to pick something out of the dirt.

  “Nannerl, look,” he said, holding an object out to me. When I peered closer, I saw a blue rock in his hand, glowing faintly as if lit from within, its grooves striped and strange like a seashell’s. I turned my attention to the other rocks strewn across the path, and when I did, I noticed that hidden underneath their coats of dust were glimpses of bright blue, an entire spread of shining, sharp fragments that had jolted our travels to a full stop. At first glance, they looked strewn in a random pattern, careless stones clumped with twigs and fallen leaves.

  But looking closer, I realized that the tracks our carriage had left behind looked like two long sets of lines in the dirt, unmistakably reminiscent of the kind that make up bars of sheet music. The shining blue rocks lay glittering across these lines, round notes winking at us in the afternoon light. My lips parted. I found myself humming the tune on the ground. The notes littering the path changed to music on my tongue, then drifted into the air and faded away. Woferl listened in wonder, his eyes fixed on the sight.

  I looked over my shoulder into the forest. An uneasy feeling seeped into my chest, coating my insides and pushing against my ribs until I could hardly breathe. Was it simple coincidence that the wheel had come off from the side where Woferl sat? Coincidence that this happened right as I felt Hyacinth’s presence in our midst, after Woferl hummed his composition?

  My brother still rubbed at his bruised forehead, although he made no more mention of it. Deep in the forest, the wind blew a tuneless song through the leaves, and in it I thought I could hear snatches of a voice I recognized all too well. Something quivered at the edges of my sight, a blurred figure. I knew that it would vanish if I tried to turn toward it.

  I took Woferl’s hand and made him drop the blue rock. He uttered a sound of protest and looked up at me with wide eyes. “Let’s stay near the carriage,” I said, guiding us back toward where Mama stood. “They are nearly finished.”

  And so they were. We began to board the carriage again, and when I glanced back at the rocks, they seemed quite brown and ordinary. The lines carved in the dirt looked more like carriage tracks this time. Only the whisper in the leaves lingered. Even as I shrank from the sound, it beckoned to me, tugging at my dress with an irresistibly coaxing song, the words almost comprehensible and yet completely foreign. As if spoken in a backward language.

  You have not forgotten me. And I have not forgotten you.

  THE SECRET PAGE

  Two weeks later, we finally arrived in Vienna on a stormy Wednesday evening, with the rain pouring in sheets down the sides of our carriage. I held Woferl’s hand and waited in our seats with Mama as Papa helped the coachman bring our trunks inside the inn. My breath clouded in the air and drifted out into the wet world.

  “Are you warm, Woferl?” I asked, pressing a hand to his forehead. His cheeks were pale, but at least his skin did not seem feverish.

  My brother only stared at the inn. “The emperor lives in an awfully small house,” he declared.

  The four of us stayed together in one room, Papa and Mama in the larger bed and Woferl and me in the smaller one. Papa had requested a clavier to be brought up to our room, so that we could practice for several days before seeing the emperor. We listened to our parents talk about how we were to deliver notice to the palace that we had arrived in the city, how Woferl and I should be presented. This was our first performance outside of Salzburg, and our reputations—as well as that of Herr Schachtner, who had arranged it all—depended on how this concert would go. As our reputations went, so would our fortunes. Everything needed to be just so.

  “Woferl needs new shoes,” Papa said.

  “Nannerl needs a new petticoat,” Mama added.

  The more I heard them talk, the more my thoughts churned. I slept poorly that night. My nightmares fed on one another, visions of a clavier with no keys, in a room with no audience. Of my hands, cracked and scarred, unable to dance to the music in my mind. Applause in another chamber, far away from where I was playing.

  The clavier came the next morning. It was a frightfully worn little thing, but Woferl clapped his hands in delight and immediately asked Papa for sheet music paper so that he could write down the concerto he was keeping in his head. He spent the rest of the day bent over pages scattered across the instrument, alternately scribbling and playing. When Mama finally had to pull him away so that he could eat something, tears sprang to Woferl’s eyes.

  “Look at this child, Anna,” Papa said to my mother. “It’s as if you are tearing his heart from his breast.”

  The sight of the paper tempted me too. Perhaps I could compose my own variation of the melodies that haunted my dreams and days—but, of course, I could not ask for such a thing. So instead I pretended not to notice as Woferl scribbled his notes down, smearing the ink across the page with the ball of his hand. When he went to play them on the clavier, I recognized them as the harmonies that he’d hummed to me in the carriage. They were intact, the very same measures.

  He had told the truth after all. He remembered every bit of it.

  Papa watched him with a bright light in his eyes. He seemed unable to speak, lest he interrupt his young son’s brilliance. If I had left the room and wandered away into the streets, I did not think he would have noticed.

  Finally, after several hours, Papa left for the palace to make sure all our arrangements were in place. Mama had taken Woferl to look at the market that sprawled in the streets outside our inn. I was alone with the clavier, which sat unused and quiet.

  I took a seat at it. The bench let out a loud creak. The keys looked yellow and scratched, the black paint nearly gone, and as I skimmed a hand across them, I noticed several notes sounded horribly out of tune. The highest E did not work at all. But it was still a clavier, and better than drumming my fingers on a wooden carriage wall. I opened my notebook, set it on the stand, and began to play.

  I started with my scales and arpeggios, then transitioned to a menuett. My fingers warmed. I closed my eyes and finally let myself sink into this safe place. In the darkness appeared a rolling line, sloping upward and then back down like a painter’s brush, smooth and bright and liquid, a climbing trail of notes that floated into open skies. My senses grew heavy with their sweetness.

  It took me a moment to realize that I was no longer playing my menuett, but the tune I’d seen strewn across our carriage’s path in the forest.

  I stopped abruptly. My eyes fluttered open. A sudden longing seized me then, and I looked over to the quill that Woferl had set on the edge of the clavier’s stand, ready for him to compose.

  My heart tightened with fear and confusion.

  Composition was a man’s realm. Everyone knew this. It was the world of Herr Handel and Herr Bach, of my father and the kapellmeisters of Europe. It was the world Woferl was already discovering. I had never questioned this rule before I’d heard the kingdom in my dreams or the princeling’s perfect voice. Composition was not my place, and my father had never hinted otherwise.

  So why could I not look away from the quill atop the clavier?

  I heard the
music in my mind, the song from the kingdom that shifted the longer I dwelled on it. My throat turned dry, and my hands trembled. When Hyacinth had told me that he would help me, was this his intent? To give me this desire?

  Papa would not approve, if he saw me. What would he do? Take away my notebook, perhaps. He might even ban me from future performances and let Woferl go alone. But most likely of all, he would destroy my composition as punishment for my disobedience. A daughter who went around her father’s lessons, who stepped into a realm that he never gave her permission to enter? He would be embarrassed at my brashness and angry at my rebellion. I imagined him tossing the music into the stove, both of us watching the delicate paper curl into ash.

  To create something, only to see it destroyed. The thought of that risk stabbed the sharpest at me. I tore my gaze from the quill, almost ready to abandon it.

  But the melody from the forest lingered in my ears, beautiful and alluring, coaxing me forward. I felt the ache of it with the same intensity as the night of my first dream, when I’d woken with my hand outstretched, wanting to be a part of that world. The rain tapped a muffled rhythm against the roof, the pulse right before a song.

  What would Hyacinth say? The glimmer in his eyes told me he would urge me on. And Woferl? He would clap his hands in delight and ask to hear the melody. Slowly, slowly, the threat of my father’s punishment began to fade against the steady desire to write it down.

  Finally, with one bold gesture, I took up the quill and dipped it into the inkwell. My hands reached up as if of their own accord toward my notebook. I turned the pages until I’d nearly reached the end, and then I stopped on a blank page that no one would think to look at.

  For a moment, I hesitated. I am done with it, Hyacinth had told me when he’d returned the notebook. Use it as your path back to me.