Shadowsong

by S. Jae-Jones

  “I see,” the woman said. “I shall see that they are delivered to the proper person.” She tipped the courier a gold coin, who tipped his hat in response before riding off into the night.

  The green-eyed woman stepped over the salt into the salon, taking care that her skirts did not break the line of protection. Back in the shadows, she scanned the letters for a signature.

  Composer of Der Erlkönig.

  She smiled and tucked the letters into her bodice before hobbling off to congratulate the boy and his black friend.

  And upstairs, Master Antonius tossed and turned in his bed, trying to drown out the sound of hooves, howls, and hounds, wondering if the Devil had come for him at last.

  The following morning, the scullery maid was turned out for stealing salt and the old virtuoso was found dead in his room, lips blue, with a curious silver slash at the throat.

  THE PRICE OF SALT

  the next day dawned bright and bitter as I woke to the sound of Mother and Constanze arguing. Their voices carried all the way from my grandmother’s quarters down to Josef’s room where I slept, and if I could hear their shouting from this tucked-away corner of the inn, then all of the guests could as well.

  “Guten morgen, Liesl!” my sister cried when I emerged from the kitchens into the main hall. A few guests were already gathered there, some to eat, others to grumble and grouse about the noise. “Will breakfast be ready soon?”

  Käthe’s voice was full of forced cheer, her cheeks pulled tight in a conspicuous smile. Behind her, I could see the disgruntled faces of our customers. If Papa were still alive, he would have smoothed tensions over by making merry with his violin. If Papa had been alive and sober, that is. If he had ever been sober.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Mother’s words were as clear as shards of glass. “Look at me, Constanze. Look at me when I’m speaking to you!”

  “Ahaha,” I tittered nervously, trying to match my sister’s smile, but it sat ill upon my face. “Soon. Breakfast will be ready soon. I just—I, ah, I need to, um, ask Mother about something.”

  Käthe glared at me, although her pleasant expression never faltered. I squeezed her hand and nimbly sidestepped her grasp, making my way upstairs to the dragon’s lair for a reckoning.

  The door to Constanze’s room was shut, but Mother’s anger was loud and sharp. She never lost her skill for projection from her days as a singer in a troupe, and knew how to make her voice a force to be reckoned with. I did not bother to knock and turned the handle instead, bracing myself for the scene inside.

  The door didn’t budge.

  Frowning, I jiggled the handle and tried again. The door remained stuck fast, as though there were something blocking the entrance. Whatever it was seemed braced against the bottom of the door, a chair or a dresser, perhaps. I shoved my shoulder against the jamb.

  “Constanze?” I called, trying to modulate my voice so the guests wouldn’t overhear. “Constanze, it’s Liesl.” I knocked again, and pushed harder. “Mother? Let me in!”

  There was no sign that either of them heard me. I put more weight against the door and suddenly felt it give a little, moving inward with an unexpected scraping sound. I pushed harder and harder, winning inch after inch against an invisible opponent. Finally, there was enough room between the door and the jamb for me to squeeze through.

  I immediately tripped upon entering, stumbling over an enormous mound of dirt, twigs, and leaves, scraping my knees in the process. “What on earth—”

  I was hands-deep in a pile of soft loam, freckled with bits of rock and stone. I looked up. Constanze’s room was in a shambles, every corner of it covered in dust and detritus from the woods outside. For a brief moment, I had the disorienting sense that I was not inside, but standing in a winter forest, the ground dusted with a light covering of snow. Then I blinked, and the world rearranged itself back into its proper order.

  It was not snow. It was salt.

  “Do you know the price of salt?” Mother cried. “Do you know how much this will cost us? How could you do this, Constanze?”

  My grandmother crossed her arms. “For protection,” she said stubbornly.

  “Protection? Against what? Goblins?” Mother gave a bitter laugh. “What about debtor’s prison? What can you do to protect us from that, Constanze?”

  With a sinking heart, I could see that Constanze had somehow dragged bags of salt up from the cellar the previous night and upended them, dumping several pounds’—several months’—worth on to the floor. This was more than the lines across every threshold and every entrance we had drawn together on the last nights of the year. My grandmother had not spilled salt as a precaution, but as insurance.

  Mother caught sight of me by the door. “Oh, Liesl,” she said hoarsely. “I didn’t hear you come in.” She ducked her head, fishing about her apron pocket for something I could not see. It was only when the light of the late morning sun struck her cheek that I realized she had been crying.

  I was thunderstruck. Mother, who had suffered twenty-odd years of emotional abuse from Constanze, never once cried before her children or her mother-in-law. It was a point of pride for her to endure with stoicism the very worst excesses of my father and my grandmother, but this had broken her. She was sobbing over spilled salt, agonized tears of anguish.

  I did not know what words of comfort to offer, so I reached into my pocket for my handkerchief and silently handed it to her. The only sound was Mother’s wretched weeping, a sound which terrified me more than any screaming match. Mother was resilient. Resolute. Resourceful. Her hopelessness more than her hiccoughs frightened me.

  “Thank you, Liesl,” she said thickly, dabbing at her eyes. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “I think Käthe needs some help with the guests downstairs, Mother,” I said quietly.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” she said. And then she was gone, unable to stand another moment in Constanze’s presence. For a moment we stood there, my grandmother and I, staring at each other, at the salt and filth on the floor between us.

  “Girl,” she rasped.

  I threw up a hand. “I don’t want to hear it, Constanze.” I yanked open the broom cupboard in her room, roughly shoving a bucket and washrag in her hands. “Either you help me clean up this mess or you march straight on downstairs to help Käthe with breakfast.”

  Her lip curled. “You would leave a fragile old woman to make her way down those rickety stairs by herself?”

  “You were obviously fine carrying all this salt from the cellar by yourself,” I said shortly. “Get started, Constanze, or make yourself useful in another way. Clean this up.” I grabbed the broom and dustpan and began sweeping.

  “And leave us vulnerable to the Hunt?”

  I resisted the urge to grab my grandmother by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. “The days of winter are over. We’ll be fine.”

  To my surprise, Constanze stamped her foot like a petulant child. “Do you not remember the stories, child?”

  In all honesty, I did not. While Josef and I had delighted in our grandmother’s gruesome tales of goblins and gore, it was always stories of Der Erlkönig to which I returned over and over as a child. My hand went to the ring I wore on a chain about my throat. The ring was silver, wrought into the shape of a wolf with two mismatched gemstone eyes, one blue, one green. The Goblin King had ever been more than a myth to me—he was a friend, a lover, a man. I released the ring, and lowered my hand.

  “The Hunt are . . . spectral horsemen,” I hedged. “Riders who galloped before death, disaster, or doom.”

  “Yes.” Constanze nodded. “Harbingers of destruction and the unraveling of the old laws. Do you not see, girl? The signs and wonders?”

  I vaguely remembered now what she had told me of the Wild Hunt. It was said Der Erlkönig himself rode at their head. I frowned. But I thought he only ever wandered the world above during the days of winter. Was it with the unholy host? To search for a bride? Yet it took a sa
crifice from a maiden to bring the world back to spring. Every year? Once a generation? What exactly were the old laws that maintained the balance between worlds?

  “Bettina?” Startled, I glanced at Constanze, whose dark eyes were fixed on my face with a faraway expression. “Do you see?”

  I took a deep breath, trying to calm my racing mind, trying to catch up to the present moment. “See what?”

  “In the corner,” she croaked. “It watches us. It watches you.”

  I blinked, wondering if it were me or my grandmother who had lost the plot. I could not grasp her thoughts, could not follow, could not understand, but was Constanze alone in her tower of nonsense, or was it me?

  I shook my head and glanced over my shoulder. “I see nothing.”

  “Because you do not choose to see,” Constanze said. “Open your eyes, Bettina.”

  I frowned. Constanze occasionally called me by my given name, Elisabeth, but more often I was merely girl or child. Never Liesl, and certainly never Bettina. I watched my grandmother carefully, wondering if she were with me, or in the midst of one of her flights of fancy.

  “Well?” she harrumphed.

  With a sigh, I turned to look again. But as before, the corner was empty of anything save dust, dirt, salt, and filth.

  “It’s on your shoulder now,” Constanze went on, pointing to a spot by my left ear.

  I swear, she grows madder by the day.

  “A strange little homunculus, with hair like thistledown and a pinched expression.” She leered, a spiteful smile on her thin lips. “It doesn’t seem to like you very much.”

  A chill ran down my spine, and for the briefest of moments, I felt the weight of tiny black claws on my back. Thistle.

  I whirled around, but the room was still empty.

  A cracked cackle came from Constanze behind me. “Now you begin to understand. You’re just like me. Beware, Bettina, beware. Heed the horn and the hound, for something wicked this way comes.”

  I snatched the wash bucket from my grandmother’s hands and shoved the broom and dustpan at her. “I’m going to fetch some water from the well,” I said, trying to hide the shaking of my voice. “You had better start straightening up before I come back.”

  “You can’t escape it.” A wide grin plastered itself across Constanze’s face, and a flame of recognition lit her dark, dark eyes.

  “Escape what?”

  “The madness,” she said simply. “The price we pay for being Der Erlkönig’s own.”

  giovanni Antonius Rossi was dead. Plague or poison, the Viennese weren’t sure which, but when the old virtuoso’s pupil and servant were found missing, they suspected the latter. But the body was untouched when the Baroness’s valet discovered him—his golden-buckled shoes still on his feet, his silver fob-watch still in his pocket, his jeweled rings still pinching the base of his gnarled and weathered fingers. No thieves they, those two boys, but their absence was damning, for if they had nothing to do with their master’s death, then why disappear?

  The city guards came for the body, to be borne away and dumped in an unmarked grave like all the rest. The Viennese no longer buried their dead within city limits for fear of spreading disease, and highborn and low, rich and poor, moldered together in common. No party followed the funereal wagon that left the city gates down the road to St. Mark’s Cemetery, for although Master Antonius had been a famous virtuoso in life, he was just another poor musician in death.

  From darkened alleyways, François watched the sad pine box grow smaller in the distance. When he came to dress the old man and found a body instead, he knew he would have to make himself scarce. He had seen what happened to other men his color once their masters died under mysterious circumstances. They were not around to tell their side of the tale. The youth knew his skin would make him a target, just as he knew his master’s death would be the cause of his doom.

  François had known this day would come ever since he was torn from his Maman’s arms and thrust like so much baggage onto the ship that bore him away from Saint-Domingue to France. No shelter, no security would ever be his, not when he was the only black pearl among a dozen ordinary ones. So he went to ground after Master Antonius’s death, vanishing into the foxholes where he could blend in with the shadows and dregs of the underworld. And so he would have stayed with the madams and mistresses of the brothels and pleasure dens were it not for his one weakness: his heart.

  He had always known that Josef was not meant for his world. The trading of flesh and favors, the crass, the carnal, the dirty, the vulgar: such things made his companion wilt and wither, but it was more than a distaste for the common and the low. The love François bore for the other boy was sweet and tender, hot and fierce all at once, but Josef never evinced anything more than a polite disinterest in such affairs. François knew that Josef’s love for him was more metaphysical than physical. He understood that their bond was not of the body, but of the mind and of the soul.

  It was what made their treatment at the hands of their former master so unbearable. So when François found Josef that fateful morning, standing over the body of their teacher with a glazed expression on his face, he held no blame, only fear in his heart.

  In the immediate aftermath of their flight from Vienna above, François and Josef took shelter with L’Odalisque, one of the grand dames of the underworld. Unlike several of the girls in her employ, she was not a Turk, but peddled fantasies of the Orient with cheap silk and opium. There were many things François regretted about staying with L’Odalisque, but it was the laudanum he regretted most.

  Josef had always been delicate, different, dreamy. He was moody and melancholy, and François had learned to temper those tempests with patience and compassion, but the girls of L’Odalisque were not so caring. Most were lost in an opium haze, their dilated eyes large and lustrous, their language lush, their movements languid. When they first arrived at L’Odalisque’s, Josef had been quiet and withdrawn, but as the days, weeks, and months went on, François watched the blue of his beloved’s eyes slowly become swallowed by the black of dreams and delirium.

  He tried hiding the bottles of laudanum. He took over managing L’Odalisque’s ledgers, painstakingly accounting for each trip to the apothecary, the doctor, the midwife. He never saw a single drop of the opium tincture cross Josef’s lips, but the blond boy grew hazier and more distant by the day, speaking in cryptic riddles, half-finished thoughts, words twisting in upon themselves like a labyrinth, mise en abyme.

  At first François thought it was his imperfect grasp of German that was the source of his confusion. The girls of L’Odalisque often spoke of a tall, elegant stranger who approached them in their poppy-laced stupor.

  “What is the tall, elegant stranger?” François asked.

  The dark and the danger, the fear and the fury, they would reply. He rides with horse and with hound, but beware! It is madness to stare into his eyes.

  And so François believed it was merely a fanciful turn of phrase for laudanum dreams, until one day, they found Josef standing over the body of the youngest girl, Antoinette. She had been discovered dead in her room, lips blue, and a silver slash on her throat.

  The tall, elegant stranger! the others cried. The stranger strikes again!

  But Antoinette had not been a lover of the poppy. Not for her was the endless sleep of one more sip, one more taste, one last oblivion.

  “Who is this stranger?” François demanded of Martina, Antoinette’s best friend in the house. “What does he look like?”

  “He looks like me,” Josef said dreamily. “I look in the mirror and the tall, elegant stranger is me.”

  It was then that François knew his beloved had gone where he could not follow. He thought of the promise he had made Josef’s sister in another time, another life.

  Take care of him.

  I will.

  And he would.

  Later that night, he stole paper, ink, and Josef’s prints of the suite known as Der Erlkönig, scribbl
ed with notes and markings in the blond boy’s inimitable, unpracticed hand.

  “I’m sorry, mon coeur,” François whispered. “Je suis désolé.”

  Slowly, carefully, he lifted letters and rearranged them into a plea for help.

  Master Antonius is dead. I am in Vienna. Come quickly.

  François hoped his beloved’s sister would come soon.

  He could no longer do this alone.

  THE MAD, THE FEARFUL, THE FAITHFUL

  there was no more salt to be had.

  The food was bland and the guests complained, but we had neither the time, the funds, nor the credit to replenish the stores Constanze had ruined. Still, we managed for a while yet, but when Käthe privately told me that there wasn’t even enough salt for baking, I knew things had become quite dire.

  “What do we do?” my sister whispered as we took stock of the stores in the cellar. We had enough flour, root vegetables, and cured meats to carry us over for the next few weeks, but little else. Ever since Papa died, the butchers, the bakers, and the brewers of town had been unwilling to extend his widow and daughters the same credit, and demanded payment in hand.

  “I don’t know.” I rubbed at my temples, trying to soothe away a headache growing there. I had not slept well, troubled by dreams I could not remember upon waking. Images melted away like snowflakes when I opened my eyes, but unease remained like a bitter chill long after I had risen. “Are you sure the money is quite gone?”

  Käthe fixed me with an exasperated look. I knew as well as she that our coffers were long since gathering dust. The inn held on to profit like a sieve held on to water.

  “Perhaps we can ask Hans if we could borrow some salt,” I suggested.

  Käthe stiffened. Ever since my sister had ended their betrothal, we had seen little of our erstwhile family friend. He had since married a distant cousin from Munich, and they were expecting a babe come next spring. No, we could not ask Hans. Not anymore.

  “What of . . . what of the parish?” Käthe said slowly. “Surely someone at the church could help us.”