by S. Jae-Jones
And there he was, standing in a distant grove with Käthe in his arms, her limp body draped across his arms like an altar cloth, her head falling back, her arms splayed. They formed a twisted sort of pietà: the Goblin King the smirking mourner, my sister the dead martyr.
I ran forward, but the instant my fingers touched her skirt, both she and the Goblin King vanished. Where my sister had lain, there was nothing more than a scrap of silk fluttering in the breeze, caught in the branches of a birch tree.
“Liesl!”
Käthe’s voice was muffled. I whirled around, desperately following the sound of her cries. There she was, caught in a cage of branches; but no, it was nothing but a tree growing from a net of brambles. Then I saw her at the mercy of several goblin swains, her arms pinioned behind her back. They no longer looked human despite their comely forms, their lascivious grins no longer inviting, but threatening.
I chased after them, but it wasn’t Käthe in their clutches; it was me. I was surrounded by tall, elegant goblin men, made in the mold of their king—languid, beautiful, cruel. I felt the touch of their lips against my skin, little love bites against my throat, as though they meant to devour me. But no, they weren’t goblin men at all, but dead winter branches: their twigs shredding my clothes and hair to ribbons.
“Liesl!”
Käthe’s cries were faint, but somehow closer. As though she were beneath me, buried somewhere deep in the earth. I fell to my knees and clawed at the dirt, digging frantically.
“Give up, Elisabeth,” the Goblin King urged. “Give up and surrender to me.”
His voice was everywhere and nowhere at once. He was the wind, he was the earth, he was the trees, the leaves, the sky and the stars. I fought against him and the forest fought back, confusing my sense of time, distance, and even self.
“Liesl!”
A muffled thumping. I cleared away the leaves and twigs and rocks and dirt before my hands hit something as hard and smooth as glass.
“Liesl!”
Beneath my hands was Käthe, trapped behind a sheet of ice. A frozen pond? I ineffectually beat at the surface, calling her name. Was she drowning? I screamed with frustration, clawing and scratching and pounding until my palms cracked and bled, leaving bloody smears over the ice.
Suddenly, the frost cleared beneath me, revealing a frantic Käthe. But for the panic on her face, she seemed hale. Yet when I peered closer, everything was all wrong. My head spun; beneath me was not the depthless black of a frozen pond, but the starry infinity of a winter sky. Käthe was not staring up at me, but down, as though kneeling beside the pond instead of floating within. Her hands struck the ice in rhythm with mine, but I could no longer tell which way was up. Was I trapped underground? Or was she?
“Give up, Elisabeth.” The Goblin King’s face was reflected in the smooth surface of the ice, but when I turned, there was no one behind me. “Let go.”
But I would not. I searched for something—anything—I could use to smash the ice between my sister and me. But there was nothing. No stone, no branch, no twig.
Then I remembered the goblin-made flute. I had thrust the instrument through the waist of my skirt once we passed from corridors to tunnels in the Underground, when I was no longer able to play it for crawling about on my hands and knees. My hands fumbled for the flute, untying the strings that held my apron, skirt, and modesty together. I did not care. I tore at my clothes and freed the instrument.
A flicker of uncertainty crossed the Goblin King’s eyes, still reflected in the ice beneath me. “Don’t, Elisabeth—”
But I never heard what he was about to say. I raised the flute above my head with both hands. The wind caught in its myriad keys and stops, playing a sweet whistling melody, drowning out all other sounds.
Then I brought the flute down like an ax with all my strength.
RESURRECTION
I opened my eyes to a bright light. I flinched and lifted a hand to shade them, but could make out nothing. It was bitterly cold, but the air was crisp and fresh and carried with it the scent of openness.
“I’m impressed.”
I squinted into the shadows. I could just make out the lanky, willowy form of the Goblin King in the darkness, but it was his eyes that caught the light and gleamed like a wolf’s.
“Against all odds, you’ve managed to break me, Elisabeth.”
My laugh was as rough as the gravel beneath my hands. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the Goblin King and I were slumped against the ground, like two soldiers fallen in battle. We lay in an earthen chamber, illuminated by a bright light overhead.
The full moon.
I sat up, wincing as my body—cold-stiffened and battered—gave a mighty protest. “Käthe,” I croaked.
The Goblin King rose and nodded his head. “Yonder.”
A small, rumpled form lay on the ground a few feet away from me. I tried to stand, but the world spun beneath me, and I collapsed. I brought myself to my hands and knees and crawled to my sister’s side.
Käthe was unconscious, but her breath misted lightly into the chilly air around us, the pulse of her heart faint but steady. I glanced at the Goblin King.
“She’s alive,” he said. “And well. Well, maybe a little worse for wear. But she is unharmed, and will come to no harm, once she wakes up in the world above.”
I stroked Käthe’s brow. Her skin was cool, but beneath my touch, her flesh felt like living, breathing skin.
“Is this it, then?” I asked. “Have I won?”
He was quiet, quiet so long I feared he would never speak again. “Yes,” he said. There was more than fatigue in his voice; there was defeat. “You win, Elisabeth.”
Somehow the declaration did not bring the sense of victory or triumph I expected. My body was bruised and bloodied, and I was tired, so tired. “Oh,” was all I said.
“Oh?” Though I couldn’t see his face clearly in the shadows, I knew his eyebrow was raised. “You who faced me in all my power, you who rent the fabric of my world asunder, you who broke the old laws—all you can say is oh?”
Of all things, this brought a smile to my face. “May I go, then?”
“You don’t need my permission, Elisabeth.” His voice was soft. “You’ve never needed my permission for anything.”
I turned my head away. “How could I possibly trust that, after everything you’ve done to me?”
There was a long silence, before a small, jagged voice returned to me. “I’ve done terrible things, yes,” he said. “And you’ve borne the brunt of it. Yes, you were right not to trust me.” The space between us, empty of words, was nevertheless filled with past regrets and painful memories. “I was your friend, once,” he said. “I had your trust, once. But I’ve squandered that horribly, haven’t I?”
“Yes.” I saw no reason to lie. But even as I told him the truth, a part of my heart protested the pain, both his and mine. I slumped over, my head against my sister’s shoulder. Our bodies rose and fell together.
“There.” The Goblin King pointed. “That is your avenue of escape.”
Moonlight streamed in from an opening above our heads, moonlight and starlight and the cold winter air.
“You are so very near to the end, you need only take the merest step to find your freedom.”
The merest step. Twenty feet above our heads, a way out into the world above. No great distance after what I had been through. But I was spent, wrung of every last drop of determination and resolve.
“Well,” said the Goblin King, a hint of impatience in his voice. “What are you waiting for? Leave me here, and go. Go back to your family, your mother and father and inimitable grandmother. Go back with your sister, go back to your brother, go back to that insufferable, stolid lover of yours and be happy.”
Mother. Papa. Constanze. Hans. Somehow, sitting here with the Goblin King was preferable to facing the world above. After all, what world would I be returning to? I thought of that false reality that had so nearly seduced me, a world wh
ere I was not Liesl the innkeeper’s drudge, Liesl the discarded sister, Liesl the lesser. That was not the world waiting for me.
“Elisabeth,” the Goblin King said. “You must leave now. The way is open as long as the moon is risen. You don’t have much time.”
“If you are so anxious for me to be gone, mein Herr,” I said, “then conjure me a ladder of vines, or a stairwell of tree roots. I am not so tall as to reach the end myself.”
“You broke me, my dear. I can scarcely conjure my name, let alone a ladder.”
“Well, you did tell me the game was unwinnable. I should have taken you at your word.”
Even his laugh was tired. “Ah, the winner’s curse,” he said. “It cost you more to win than to lose.” Then he sobered. “It cost us both.”
“What will it cost you?” I did not have the strength—or the heart—to mock him now, not when we were both broken. “What will it cost you but a bride?”
“Oh, Elisabeth. It will cost us both everything.”
I waited. I laid my head against Käthe’s soft flesh, listening to the slow thump of her beating heart.
“As the old year dies, so too does the world. Without sacrifice, nothing good can grow. Without death, there can be no rebirth. A life for life, that is the cost.”
“You have heard that it hath been said: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” I murmured.
“Aye,” he said. “The old laws and God’s laws are not so different.”
“You could,” I began, but the words stuck in my throat. “You could find another bride, couldn’t you?”
“Yes,” the Goblin King said. He sounded almost hurt. “I suppose I could.”
“You suppose?”
It was a long time before he answered. “Would you like another story, my dear? It isn’t as pretty as my last, I’m afraid.”
“Before moonset?” I glanced through the threshold to the world above.
He laughed. “We have time enough for this.”
I nodded.
“Once upon a time, a savage, violent time, humans, goblins, kobolds, Hödekin, and Lorelei lived side by side in the world above, feeding, fighting, preying, slaying. It was, as I had said, a dark time, and Man turned to dark practices to keep the blood tides at bay. Sacrifices, you see. Man turned against brother, fathers against daughters, sons against mothers, all to appease the goblins. To stop the needless deaths, one man—one stupid, foolish man—made a bargain with the old laws of the land, offering himself as a sacrifice.”
“The last time, it was a beautiful maiden,” I said from my spot by Käthe’s side.
“A brave maiden,” the Goblin King corrected.
I smiled.
“His soul was the price,” he continued. “The price he paid to sunder the goblins and the fey from the world above. His soul—and his name. No longer a mortal man, he became Der Erlkönig. For his bargain, the foolish man was granted immortality, and the power to manipulate the elements as it suited his needs. He restored order, seasons progressed in their normal manner. But the further away from mortality he grew, the more capricious and cruel he became, forgetting what it was like to live and love.”
He was right; it wasn’t a pretty story. What did immortality do to one who was once mortal? It stretched him thin. I watched what little I could see of the Goblin King from my vantage point. In this half-light, in this half-space between the Underground and the world above, I thought I could see the mortal man he might have been. The austere young man in the portrait gallery. That soft-eyed young man who had been my friend.
“It isn’t just the life of a maiden I needed, you know,” the Goblin King said quietly. I glanced sharply at him; his tone had changed. “It was what a maiden can give me.”
“And what is that?”
His smile was crooked. “Passion.”
Heat flared in my cheeks.
“Not that sort of passion,” he said quickly. Did I imagine things, or were his cheeks tinged a faint pink? “Well, yes, that too. Passion of all sorts,” he said. “Intensity.”
“Goblins do not feel the way mortals do,” he went on. “You humans live and love so fiercely. We crave that. We need that. That fire sustains us. It sustains me.”
“Is that why you stole Käthe away?” I looked at my sister, thinking of her voluptuous body and inviting laugh. “Because of the passion she inspired?”
The Goblin King shook his head. “The sort of passion she inspires in me is all flash and no heat. I need an ember, Elisabeth, not a firecracker. Something that burns longer, to keep me warm for this night and all other nights to come.”
“So Käthe…”
I could not finish my question.
“Käthe,” he said in a low voice, “was a means to an end.”
The way he spoke of my sister vexed me. A means, as though she were cheap. Disposable. Worthless.
“To what end?” I asked.
“You know the answer, Elisabeth,” he said softly.
And I did. The goblin merchants, the flute, all the way back to when he had granted my wish to save Josef’s life—everything he had done, he had done for me.
“A means to an end,” I whispered. “Me.”
He did not deny it.
“Why?”
The Goblin King was silent for a long while. “Who else but you?” he asked lightly. “Whose life would you rather it be?”
He was avoiding answering my question. We did not look at each other. The darkness was too complete, and the light from the world above too harsh. But I could feel an answer between us, pulsing like a heartbeat. It made my breath come faster.
“Me,” I said, a little more loudly. “Why me?”
“Why not you?” he returned. “Why not the girl who played her music for me in the Goblin Grove when she was a child?”
He had said so much, yet nothing I wanted to hear. That he desired me. That he had chosen me. That he … I wanted to hear the truth in his eyes said aloud. I could feel his gaze upon every part of my body: on my neck, where my shoulder disappeared into the torn sleeves of my blouse, the line of my collarbone as it led to my décolletage, the swell and ebb of my breasts as I breathed. I had waited for this my entire life, I realized. Not to be found beautiful—but desirable. Wanted. I wanted the Goblin King to claim me as his own.
“Why me?” I repeated. “Why Maria Elisabeth Ingeborg Vogler?”
I held his eyes with mine. He had his pride, but so had I. If I were to make good on the promise I made that little dancing boy in the wood all those years ago, I needed to hear validation from his own lips.
“Because,” he said. “Because I loved the music within you.”
I closed my eyes. His words were the spark to the tinder lining my blood; they touched my heart and warmth blazed from within, spreading through me like wildfire.
“A life for a life,” I said. “Does that mean … does that mean the sacrifice must die?”
“What does it mean to die?” the Goblin King asked. “What does it mean to live?”
“I told you I don’t find the philosopher charming.”
A laugh, a real, startled, human laugh. “There is,” he said, “no one like you, Elisabeth.”
“Answer my question.”
The Goblin King paused. “Yes. The sacrifice must die. She must leave the world of the living and enter the realm of Der Erlkönig, enter the Underground.” He lifted his eyes to mine, those mismatched eyes, so startling, so beautiful. “She will be dead to the world above.”
Dead to the world above. I thought of Papa, Mother, Constanze, Hans, and, with a painful twinge, Josef. In many ways, I was already dead.
“We have both lost,” I said.
He gave me a sharp glance. “What do you mean?”
“You win, I lose my sister. I win, I condemn the world above to eternal winter. Is that not the true outcome of our game, Mein Herr?”
He could not deny it.
“Then I propose we call a draw. Then we both get what we
want. I, my sister’s freedom and you”—I swallowed—“will have me. Entire.”
He was silent for a long while. “Oh, Elisabeth,” he said. “Why?”
I looked at where Käthe lay, still senseless on the floor. “For my sister.” I pulled her into the circle of light. “For my brother.” I looked from Käthe to the hollow above us. “For my family. And the world above.”
The Goblin King moved closer, slowly and haltingly, as though in pain. “That is not enough, Elisabeth.”
“Is it not?” I asked with a dark laugh. “Is the world not enough? Could I condemn everyone to an eternal winter, spring and life never returning?”
He hovered on the edge of the circle of light. I could see the figure of his body outlined in silver and black, and the slim shape of his hand just beyond the circle’s edge.
“Always thinking of others,” the Goblin King murmured. “But that’s still not enough. Don’t you ever make any wishes for yourself, Elisabeth?”
What would be enough? He had an answer he wanted to hear, but I withheld it. Games and more games. We would always be dancing with each other, the Goblin King and I.
“All right, then,” I said. “For love.”
It was a while before he spoke. “For love?” His voice was rough.
“Yes,” I said. “After all, we all make sacrifices for love.” I leaned over and kissed my sister on the forehead. “We make them every day.” I lifted my eyes to where his shadow stood beyond the edge of light. The two-toned eyes gleamed at me and while I could not see the rest of his face, the hopefulness in them moved me. “You called me selfless,” I said. “So I claim selfishness. Because for once, I want to love myself best, instead of last.”
He said nothing. He was silent so long I feared I had made a mistake, but then he opened his mouth to speak.
“Think well on this, Elisabeth.” There was a fervor in his voice I could not quite discern. “Your choice, once made, cannot be unmade. I am not so generous as to offer you your freedom again.”
I hesitated. I could fight him. I could force his hand, make him bring Käthe and me back to the world above. I’d defeated him before and I could do it again.
