by Marie Lu
Then, abruptly, I saw a figure sitting on the top curve of the stairs.
It looked like a person, but I could not be sure. It sat hunched against the wall, veiled in black, and its face stayed hidden inside its hooded cloak. I thought I could hear it humming.
If you see someone on the stairs, do not look at them.
I quickly turned my eyes down to the steps. My heart began to pound. Slowly, I started to make my way up again, pressing myself tightly against the opposite side of the stairs as I neared the figure. Behind me, the footsteps continued from the darkness swallowing the stairs.
The seated figure drew near. I could only see it as a blurry shadow from the corner of my eye. Everything in me screamed to look at it, but I forced myself not to as I quickened my pace. I wondered if I should run past the figure and risk provoking it, or creep slowly by and risk being within its grasp. I steadied myself against the wall. I had no choice. I had to keep going.
I could hear its humming distinctly now. It sang a strange tune, a song that changed from common time to notes that came in thirds, lighthearted notes mixed in with sharp, off-key bridges. The music reminded me of what I’d heard in the château, on the day I’d refused Hyacinth’s request.
I edged close to the figure, and then I was directly across from it, and my nightgown brushed silently against the ends of its robe. Goose bumps peppered my skin.
Careful, I told myself through my terror. If I tripped, I might fall down into the waiting grasp of the unseen creature following me. Hyacinth, help me. Where are you?
I slowly passed the seated figure. It did not move. The humming grew slightly fainter. The tower’s ceiling was close to me now—I was nearly at the top.
Then, the seated figure spoke. Its voice came out as a whisper that wrapped around me.
“Nannerl.”
At my name, I instinctively turned. The figure was looking straight at me, one of its bony hands outstretched from its robes. My eyes unwittingly settled on its face.
Under the shadow of its hood, the face had nothing but a mouth filled with teeth. “Will you play something for me?” it whispered.
If they ask you a question, do not answer.
Then it lurched forward, clawing its way up the stairs toward me. At its feet came another, each one stirred to life by the one before it. They were the same creatures that had glided around the tower and outside our home during my illness.
I broke my careful walk and ran. My feet slipped, and I fell hard against the wet stones. I gritted my teeth and scrambled up the stairs on my hands and knees. Behind me came the clatter of bone scraping against stone. The creatures were following in my wake.
Above me, the door to the top of the tower came into view, a heavy, rusted chain hanging on its knob.
My hands clawed at the closed door. One of the creatures on the stairs called out to me again. Nannerl. Its words hung, haunted and rasping, in the air. Won’t you give me the flower?
Through my panic, I remembered Hyacinth’s warning about the night flower.
Do not give it to anyone.
I took the night flower out of my pocket and began to crush it in my hands. Its thorns cut at my skin. I bit my lip hard until I could taste blood in my mouth, but I did not stop. The flower crumbled into ash, the petals hard and brittle, and the thorns turned into powder. The creatures crawled closer on the stairs, their voices turning into a cacophony of snarls. All I could see were their teeth.
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 mome
nts 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.
Hyacinth was not the kingdom’s princeling.
It meant that his wish, to reclaim his birthright and his throne, to reunite with his sister, was also a lie. What was his true wish, then? He had bargained with me . . . to what end? I thought of the hunger in his eyes at the top of the tower, all he had done and all he’d had me do.
He had wanted to devour the princess at the top of the castle.
My gaze returned to the fragile, curled form of my brother, his chest rising and falling in a gentle rhythm. A thought began to take shape. Had Hyacinth not once told me that the young prince was never found? That the Queen of the Night never knew what happened to her child? Hyacinth was not the kingdom’s princeling, but someone was. And if Hyacinth had wanted all along to devour the princess, perhaps he now hungered for the princeling too.
Perhaps it was the reason Woferl pricked his finger on the night flower. The reason for his illnesses. The reason for his strange dreams, the faraway look in his eyes. Most of all, perhaps it was the reason for Hyacinth’s promise to fulfill my wish. The air around me felt too thin now. I shifted, dizzy from the truth.
Woferl was the young princeling of the Kingdom of Back.
And perhaps, perhaps, everything Hyacinth had done was in order to find a way to claim Woferl’s soul in the same way he had claimed the princess.
You can be remembered, if he is forgotten. So let me take him away, Fräulein. I heard the words whispered as clearly as if he were standing beside me.
Deep in a corner of my mind, Hyacinth blinked in the dark, stirred, and smiled.
* * *
As we left Lille for Amsterdam, then Rotterdam, then the Austrian Netherlands, strange things started to happen.
Snow fell during one of our concerts on a sunny afternoon. News came from London that an unusual plague had broken out in England’s countryside. At the same time, we began to hear reports of vicious attacks across France, of man-eating wolf dogs prowling the mountain paths near Périgord.
“Herr von Grimm said the Beast of Gévaudan has a tail as long as I am tall,” Woferl said, knees on his chair as we ate a supper of lentil soup and spaetzle. He stretched his arms out. “And twice the rows of teeth of any wolf.”
Mama scolded him to sit down properly, while Papa chuckled. “And what makes you believe everything Herr von Grimm has to say?” he asked.
Woferl brightened, hungry to coax more smiles out of our father. “Well, he said I knew more at my age than most kapellmeisters in Europe.” He glanced at me. “He said Nannerl had the finest execution on the harpsichord. Isn’t that all truth?”
I looked up at my brother’s praise. His eyes darted to me for an instant before flickering away. He was curious about my mood lately, my quiet spells and faraway expressions. This was his way of reaching out to me.
I gave him a careful, practiced expression of gratitude. “You are very kind, Woferl,” I said to him. “Thank you.”
Woferl’s joy dampened at my response. He knew it was the kind of polite answer I gave to the nobility we played for, whenever I wanted to leave a good impression. He stared at me, searching for the truth beneath my trained response, but I just looked away from him and back to my plate. Perhaps he thought I was still angry with him because of my music. And perhaps I was. But I could not look at him without remembering what had happened in the kingdom, and what Hyacinth might want with him.
Papa sensed none of this odd tension between us. He laughed genuinely. Few things pleased him more than a reminder of courts impressed by our performances, and Herr von Grimm had indeed said those words when we’d played for the Prince of Conti in Paris during an afternoon tea.
Mama paused to meet our father’s eye. “It might not be a bad plan to avoid the mountain paths,” she said meaningfully to him.
Papa waved a nonchalant hand as he stirred his soup. “Nothing more than tales exaggerated by panicked witnesses, no doubt. There have been no reports from around Paris.”
“Louis XV himself has put a bounty on any wolf corpse brought in to him,” Mama said. “If the king fears this beast, then perhaps we should as well.”
“Beast.” Papa said the word through a twisting mouth, his distaste for the imaginary souring his good mood. “There is no such thing as a beast.”
I ate quietly. The conversation swirled around me like the waters of a murky lake, and my family smeared into distortion. None of us had said another word about my music published as a birthday present for the Prince of Orange. It was possible that my father had already forgotten all about it, that he had been paid his coin and promptly tucked my music away in some dusty corner of his mind.
And yet, I could feel the weight of this betrayal hanging over the dinner table like a storm. Everyone knew. Sometimes I waited for my father’s punishment to come, for him to finally confront me one day about my compositions and toss them into the fire, like I’d always feared.
I would have preferred that over this silence, this dismissal of what I’d written.
The thought sent such a chill through my bones that I shivered in the warm room, trying to stop my lips from snarling into a grimace.
I knew very well who was killing the people of Périgord and Gévaudan. I’d seen his form in my dreams last night, prowling through tall grasses. It was not a wolf dog, but a faery creature with a splitting grin and yellow eyes, hungry for more flesh now that I had finally helped him get a taste.
What I did not know was what I now wished. A part of me needed to return to the Kingdom of Back, to set right what I had done wrong. The Queen of the Night had tried to warn me, yet I had not believed her. The king’s champion had called out for me to come back, and yet I had thought him an ogre and fled. The river guardian had tried to keep me out. And yet, I had helped a monster. I had to fix what I’d done.
But a part of me still yearned for my wish, feared that I had lost it forever. Could I be remembered, without Hyacinth’s help? Was I now doomed to be forgotten, if I did not continue along with Hyacinth’s demands? I want what is mine, I’d told him. I still did.
And a part of myself that frightened me—a whisper in the shadows, a figure waiting in the woods—wanted to see my brother walk into the air. He would turn lighter and lighter until you could barely make out his shape. And when you finally blinked, he would be gone.
* * *
Weeks later, we finally returned to Salzburg.
I leaned out of our carriage to admire the Getreidegasse as we passed through it, even though Sebastian and Mama told me to sit properly. The touch of the air, the smells that came with late autumn, the old wrought-iron signs that hung over the storefronts—it was all still there, in exactly the same spots they’d been when we’d first left years ago. For a moment, I forgot all about Hyacinth and my music and let myself indulge in the returning familiarity of this place. My hea
rt hung on a hook, raw with anticipation, as we drew close to the row where our flat would be.
Here was home. Here, also, might be a letter from Johann, written and addressed to me. I tried to conjure up his hopeful face in my mind, the way we’d talked and laughed in my old dream. What might he say in a letter? Was he still traveling through Europe, visiting universities? Did he have plans to come to Austria? It didn’t matter to me. All I knew was that, if his letters had arrived, I needed to get to them before my parents did.
Beside me, Woferl sensed my tenseness and turned his face up to study mine. In the light, I saw the first hints of his adolescent cheekbones. How quickly he had turned twelve. How swiftly I had turned sixteen. We did not have many years left together now. I looked nervously away from him and back to the street. The feel of his eyes on me seeped through my back.
Papa hopped out of the carriage when it’d just barely come to a stop. Down by the entrance to our building stood Herr Hagenauer, our landlord, and he beamed as Papa came up to him to close his hands in a hearty shake. There was a hasty conversation about the rent, about giving us more time to pay for the months we’d been gone. I waited until Woferl slid off his seat to follow our father before I reached out to touch my mother’s arm.
“Mama, please,” I whispered, my gaze darting to where Papa and Herr Hagenauer were chatting loudly. She glanced back at me. “Can you get our mail and see if there is any for me?”
Her brows lifted in surprise. “Just for you, Nannerl?” She knew to whisper it.
I flushed hot and hoped no one else could see it. “Yes, Mama,” I murmured.
She frowned. “And from whom?”
“His name is Johann.” I swallowed, suddenly unsure whether Mama would keep a secret like this for me. “He attended one of our concerts and said he wanted to write with his best wishes.”
