Wintersong

by S. Jae-Jones

  My brother managed to regain his composure, and nodded at François, setting the tempo with his bow. The two began to play, and a hush fell over the room.

  To the untrained ear, it might have been hard to distinguish Josef’s—or even François’s—playing from any other professional musician. They hit all their notes with precision and clarity, their phrasing impeccable. But if you knew my brother as I did, or even if you loved music at all, you could feel the intelligence, the intent, behind his performance. He interpreted what was written into something almost like speech, as if he could wring words and sentences from the notes and phrases.

  But the majority of the assembled guests were not trained in music, and shortly after the two started playing, the low buzz of conversation arose once more. Most returned to their food and drink, keeping their voices down to a respectful murmur. A polite few kept their attention focused on Josef and François: Master Antonius, my family, and Hans. But I spied another in a darkened corner of the room, and my heart stopped.

  It was the Goblin King.

  He sat among us, brazen and bare-faced, inconspicuously dressed in leather trousers and a roughspun woolen coat. Yet it was difficult to miss his unusual height, his slender physique, his strange coloring, so starkly different from the rest of us stocky, dark-haired peasants. The Goblin King caught my eye. His gaze reached right through me, touching some private core deep within me no one else could see. His lips twisted to one side, a sardonic smile.

  His presence scratched that itch in my mind, that niggling sense of something lost. And then it all returned to me in a rush of fear: spindly fingers and bloody fruit, my sister in a red cloak in a winter wood, a forgotten conversation among the alders. Suddenly, it was just the two of us, suspended in a moment. Time, like memory, was just another one of his toys.

  I was torn. I wanted to confront him. I wanted to ignore him. But I was afraid to approach the Goblin King, afraid to acknowledge his existence. To confront him was to make him real, and I wanted to keep him my beautiful, indulgent secret.

  “Yes, yes,” Master Antonius murmured, nodding approvingly.

  The moment burst, and the sounds of Josef’s and François’s playing returned to me, beautiful and pure.

  “Very impressive. Very impressive indeed.”

  My hopes lifted. Master Antonius wore a smug, self-congratulatory expression on his face.

  “François is quite a specimen, no?”

  Disgust roiled through me. Specimen. This was the man into whose hands we were entrusting Josef’s career.

  “Astonishing,” Master Antonius continued in a conspiratorial whisper, sotto voce, to my father. “I picked him up as a babe from a traveler from Saint-Domingue. His mother was a slave back in Hispaniola, and his father some no-account sailor. Not a shred of musical ability between the two of them, and look at him now! Proof that if you get them young, you can train these Negroids like any other person.”

  I was going to be sick. Of all people, the old virtuoso should know that music was God’s gift to man. Music, and a soul. Skills could be taught, but talent could not. François’s fingers flew over the keyboard with ease, and the proof of his soul lay in his playing, more human than Master Antonius.

  I could not bear to watch any longer. Unbidden, my eyes went to the darkened corner where I had last seen the Goblin King, but there was no one there. Perhaps I had imagined him after all.

  Two more movements in the sonata to go, but I could see that Master Antonius had already made up his mind. No one could deny Josef’s skill, but there was something missing from the notes, something special, something more.

  Papa made a mistake, I thought. Haydn was too cerebral for my brother; Josef would have been better served by Vivaldi, as I had suggested. Vivaldi was a violinist; he had known of the instrument’s capabilities and wrote for them. Josef knew this. I knew this. Papa had known this too, once.

  The main hall was overly warm now, stuffed with bodies comfortably digesting their Kraut, Wurst, und Bier. Josef and François played on, oblivious to everything but the joy of each other’s performance. I noted how they responded to each other’s cues: the sway of my brother’s body, the tilt of François’s shoulders, they played like lovers who knew every nuance of the other’s sighs. Tears started in my eyes.

  Polite applause rose from the assembly as the movement wound to a close. Josef and François smiled at each other, a glow of joy bathing both their faces. Papa clapped like a fiend, but Master Antonius hid a bored yawn behind his hand.

  “Very good, very good,” the old virtuoso said to Josef. “You are quite talented, young man. You will go far with the right teacher.”

  My brother’s face fell. Josef was naïve, not blind, and he knew exactly what Master Antonius hadn’t offered along with his congratulations: an apprenticeship.

  “Yes, sir.” His blue eyes shimmered in the firelight. “My thanks for the opportunity to play for you.”

  The sight of my brother’s unshed tears was the last straw. “And just who is the right teacher, maestro?” My voice cut through the chatter and applause like a scythe. “Who could possibly take Josef on as a pupil if not you?”

  A hush fell over the room. I felt the astonished stares like daggers at my back, but I ignored them. Master Antonius’s eyes sharpened as they focused on me.

  “Ignore her, Antonius,” Papa said. “She overreaches herself.”

  The old virtuoso waved him off. “I have my reasons for taking the pupils I do, Fräulein,” he said. “And while your brother is a very talented musician, he lacks a certain, how do you say, je ne sais quoi?”

  His pretension was as odious as his condescension; his French was scarcely better than mine, and with a decidedly Italian accent. “And what is that, maestro?” I asked.

  “Genius.” Master Antonius looked smug. “True genius.”

  I crossed my arms. “Pray, be more specific, maestro,” I said. “I’m afraid we rustic peasants have not your worldly experience.” Grumbles from the audience, and their pointed daggers of curiosity were aimed at Master Antonius now.

  “Liesl,” Papa warned. “You overreach yourself.”

  “No, no, Georg,” the old violinist said. “The young lady has a point.” He smirked. “True genius is not just technical skill, yes? Any fool could learn to play all the right notes. It takes a certain … passion and brilliance to bring the notes together to say something true. Something real.”

  I nodded in agreement. “Then if true genius is performance and ability and passion,” I said, not daring to look at Papa, “perhaps my brother was ill-served by the choice of music.”

  This piqued the old master’s interest. He lifted his bushy brows, his dark eyes beady in his fleshy face. “So the little Fräulein fancies herself a better tutor than her father! Well, I am tickled. You amuse me, girl. Very well, then, I shall humor you. What will you have your brother play?”

  Josef turned panicked eyes on me. I gave him a small smile, the one he called my pixie smile, playful and mischievous.

  I walked to the fortepiano. François graciously gave way. Josef looked nervous, but he trusted me, trusted me completely. I placed my hands against the keys and began to play a set of repeating sixteenth notes, trying my best to imitate the pizzicato sound of a violin.

  My brother’s eyes brightened when he recognized the ostinato.

  Yes, Sepp, I thought. Now we shall play the L’inverno.

  He tucked his violin under his chin, his bow poised over the strings. After another measure, Josef closed his eyes and began to play the second movement, the largo, from Vivaldi’s L’inverno.

  The melody was gentle and a little melancholy; when we were babies, Papa used to play the largo as a lullaby. The piece was simple enough that three-year-old Sepperl had learned it by ear on his quarter-size violin, but it was a piece to grow on. My brother had experimented with flourishes and improvisations, refining the music until it became something solely his own. No one could wring shades of nosta
lgia and wistful longing from this movement like Josef. As he grew older and more skilled, he’d continued to practice it over and over until he and his violin were one. Of all the sonatas and concertos Josef knew, this was the one that sounded the closest to his own voice, the one in which his violin sounded the most human.

  The violin sang, serenading all those who listened, weaving a spell that made the silence around it sound reverent. Holy.

  The largo movement of the winter suite wasn’t long, and all too soon, Josef and I approached the end of the piece. His body was slowing down, taking the last trill ritardando. I strove to match him, slowing down my accompaniment as the last note faded away with a tremulous shimmer.

  The quivering memory of that final note held us rapt. Then thunderous applause broke the spell, started by Master Antonius himself. François leaped to his feet with shouts of “Bravo! Bravissimo!”

  Josef colored, but his eyes shone as he grinned at François. Without warning, he launched into the third movement of Vivaldi’s L’estate, the presto. Intense and fast, it called for all his abilities as a virtuoso player, and I could not keep up with him. I had adapted the accompaniment to the largo myself, but I hadn’t done the other seasons. François nodded at me and I relinquished my seat to him.

  Within a heartbeat, he found Josef in the music and launched into the performance. He pounded the chords where my brother emphasized the shivering trills, he relented when my brother dropped a phrase sotto voce. He knew when to pause to allow Josef’s incredible playing to take flight, where to supplement the holes in the accompaniment to sound seamless. My throat was tight; this slender, dark-skinned youth knew my brother’s unspoken cues even better than I. He could fall into Josef’s rhythms without thought, and he could adapt and modify music he knew and music he didn’t.

  Somehow, incredibly, they finished exactly in unison. The hall erupted with praise. Papa clapped Josef on the back, shouting loudly for all to hear that he had taught the boy everything he knows, while Master Antonius could be heard congratulating François’s astonishing impromptu performance.

  “I didn’t even know you knew Vivaldi, François, you sly dog!” The violin master turned to Josef. “You!” he said. “Now you are a young man of taste and vision. Vivaldi! Il Prete Rosso, or the Red Priest, as we called him back home. He did much for the violin, you know, even as some people”—Master Antonius shot a look at Papa—“no longer recognize his genius.”

  Never mind that it had been I who suggested Vivaldi, not Josef; it was lost in the rush and aftermath of my brother’s playing.

  “Thank you, maestro.” Josef’s face was flushed, his eyes aglow. I sought out his gaze to congratulate him, but he had eyes for François and François alone. The youth looked back.

  I turned away. Papa shouted and toasted and drank to celebrate his son, and Mother—stern, stoic, unsentimental Mother—wept unashamedly into her apron. Constanze nodded her approval from her nest by the hearth, while Käthe …

  My heart stopped.

  Where was Käthe?

  Gone, a soft voice murmured in my ear.

  Startled, I looked over my shoulder. No one was there, but my ear tingled from the brush of someone’s lips. The jubilation continued on around me, but I was excluded, standing outside everyone else’s excitement.

  “Käthe,” I whispered.

  Gone, the voice said again.

  This time I saw him.

  He was standing in a far corner of the main hall, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. The tall, elegant stranger.

  The Goblin King.

  He was the still point around which everything revolved. He was reality where everything else was a reflection. He stood out in sharp relief when everything else was muted, as though we were the only two alive and present in a world of illusion and shadow. He smiled at me, and every fiber of my being reached for him. His very grin could command my flesh to dance.

  He nodded, indicating the door that led outside. He moved through the crowd like a wraith, a geist passing through the revelers like mist. They never noticed the touch of his hand as he gently moved them out of the way, only pausing in their conversations as if they felt an unexpected chill. But not a soul saw the Goblin King as he walked among them—it was me, and me alone.

  He paused at the threshold of the door, glancing over his shoulder. He lifted a pale brow.

  Come.

  It was more than a summons; it was a command. I felt the call in my bones, the tug upon my flesh, but still I resisted.

  Those icy eyes glittered, and I was afraid. I trembled, but not with cold. I ached, but not with pain. My feet began to move of their own accord, and I followed the Goblin King out of the light and into the darkness.

  THE TALL, ELEGANT STRANGER

  “He plays well, your brother.”

  I blinked. The world around me was dark, and it was a long time before I began to make shapes out in the gloom. Trees, and a full moon. The Goblin Grove. I had no memory of how I had gotten here.

  A velvet voice stroked down my spine. “I’m quite pleased, quite pleased indeed.”

  I turned around. The Goblin King was lounging against one of the alder trees in the grove, one arm draped against the trunk, the other resting casually against his hip. His hair was in wild disarray, ruffled and feathery, like thistledown, like spiderwebs, illuminated by the full moon into a halo about his head. His face held all the beauty of angels, but the grin upon his face was positively devilish.

  “Hello, Elisabeth,” he said softly.

  I stood dumb and silent. How did one respond to Der Erlkönig, Lord of Mischief, Ruler of the Underground? How did one address a legend? My mind spun, trying to reel in my emotions. The Goblin King stood before me, in flesh and not in memory.

  “Mein Herr,” I said.

  “So polite.” His voice was as dry as autumn leaves. “Ah, Elisabeth, we need not stand on formalities here. Have we not known each other your entire life?”

  “Liesl,” I said. “Then call me Liesl.”

  The Goblin King grinned. The tips of his pointed teeth gleamed. “I much prefer Elisabeth, thank you. Liesl is a girl’s name. Elisabeth is the name of a woman.”

  “And what do I call you?” I strove to keep my voice from shaking.

  Again that predator’s smile. “Whatever you like,” he murmured. “Whatever you like.”

  I ignored the purr in his voice. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “Tsk, tsk.” The Goblin King waved one long, slender finger at me. “I had thought you a worthy opponent. We were playing a game, Fräulein, but you don’t seem much inclined to engage me.”

  “A game?” I asked. “What game?”

  “Why, the best game in the world.” He leaped from his languid pose by the alder tree, suddenly alert, suddenly sharp. “One where I take something you love and hide it. If you don’t come find it, it’s mine to keep.”

  “What are the rules?”

  “The rules are simple,” he said. “I find it, I keep it. I’ll note that you haven’t made much of an effort to play. A pity,” he pouted. “We used to play so often when you were a child. Don’t you remember, Elisabeth?”

  I closed my eyes. Yes, I had played with Der Erlkönig when I was young, after Käthe had gone to bed, before Sepperl was old enough to talk. Back when I was still myself, whole and entire, before time and responsibility had whittled me to a sliver of myself. I would run to the Goblin Grove to greet the Lord Underground. I would be dressed in a gown of the finest silk and satin, he trimmed in lace and brocade. The musicians would play and we would dance, dancing to the music I heard in my head. It was when I first began to write down my musical scribblings, when I first began to compose.

  “I remember,” I said in a low voice.

  But did I remember something I had imagined, or something real? There was pretend, and then there was memory. I could see little Liesl dancing with the Goblin King, a Goblin King who was always just a little older, just a little out
of reach. A Goblin King who fulfilled all her childish fantasies, who told her she was pretty, who told her she was cherished, who told her she was worthy of being loved. Was that a memory? Or a dream?

  “But not everything.” He leaned in close. He was not my size now; he was tall and reed-thin. Had he been an ordinary man, he might have been called lanky. But he was not an ordinary man; he was Der Erlkönig, possessed of a preternatural grace. Every movement of his body was smooth, fluid, purposeful. He stood by me, hovering over my shoulder, breathing into my neck. “Do you remember, Elisabeth, the little games of chance we used to play?”

  Wagers. Constanze said goblin men loved to gamble. If you could trick them into playing with you, they bet everything until they lost.

  I recalled the games the Goblin King and I had played, simple enough guessing games with simple enough stakes. Wishes and favors and hopes laid out on the betting table like cards.

  Guess which hand holds the golden ring.

  I remembered laughing and picking a hand at random.

  What will you bet, little Liesl? What will you give up if you lose? What will you gain if you win?

  What answer had I given? I was suddenly, terribly, horribly afraid of what young Liesl had been willing to give. What I had unwittingly sacrificed.

  “You lost the game.” The Goblin King circled me, a wolf stalking a hart. “You lost every game.”

  I never chose right. The prize was never in the hand I thought. Perhaps the game had been stacked against me from the start.

  “You promised me something I desperately needed,” he continued, drawing out his syllables into a drawl. “Something only you could give.” His eyes glowed in the dark. “I am a generous soul, Elisabeth, but no man waits forever.”

  “And what did I promise?” I whispered.

  The Goblin King chuckled, and the sound rippled through my body.

  “A wife, Elisabeth. You promised me a bride.”