Shadowsong

by S. Jae-Jones

  The bottom fell from my stomach, that sickening lurch that accompanies an unexpected misstep. Elf-struck.

  “They’re only rumors, of course,” she said quickly, seeing the expression on my face. “It’s just . . . you are a clever young woman with a good head on your shoulders, Elisabeth. Use your judgment and take heed, is all.”

  I ran my thumb over the wax seal on the letter, tracing the shape of the poppy petals. For all that I did not want to admit it, my landlady was merely voicing my doubts about our patron aloud. We had not met with Count Procházka or seen him since we had arrived in Vienna. Not once. Messages were few and far between, mostly concerned with our domestic details—clothing, groceries, rent. For someone who had been so eager to bring us to Vienna, he seemed considerably less interested in seeing us in the city. It was getting harder and harder to ignore my unease the longer we were here.

  “I thank you for your warning,” I said slowly. “And will take your advice into account.” I picked up the folds of my skirts and started to make my way to the landing above when Frau Messner called my name one last time.

  “Elisabeth.”

  I waited.

  “Beware.” Frau Messner’s face was hard. “It is not the wolves you need fear, but the sheep skins they wear.”

  * * *

  Käthe and François were home when I returned to our apartments. She sat on the bed surrounded and swathed by yards of fabric, her fair head bent over her sewing, while François carefully cut and basted patterns on the nearby table. Of the four of us—my sister, my brother, François, and me—only Käthe had a practical skill that could be leveraged to bring us some extra income. My sister assisted the dressmaker down the street with simple needlework, constructing basic gowns for the tailor to finish for each of his clients.

  “Where’s Josef?” I asked, hanging my hat and bonnet on a peg by the door and setting down the week’s shopping. François rose from the table to assist me, all too eager to leave his sewing behind.

  “What took so long?” Käthe snapped. Carnival was fast approaching, and the Viennese celebrated with balls and masques before the Lenten season put an end to all luxury and frivolity. Herr Schneider was overwhelmed with work and had given much of it—along with his irritability—over to my sister to manage in his stead. “I need to finish these gowns by tomorrow and could use all the help I can get.”

  I looked to François, who shrugged apologetically. His German had improved by leaps and bounds since we first met him, but his gestures were just as eloquent as his words. I do not know where Josef is, mademoiselle.

  I sighed. “I was waylaid by our meddlesome Frau Messner.”

  Käthe rolled her eyes. “What did the old busybody want?”

  “The usual.” I held up the message from Count Procházka. “Any bit of gossip about our esteemed benefactor, of course.”

  “A letter?” François asked. “From the comte?” We corresponded so rarely with our patron that any contact between us was a source of both fascination and fear.

  “Yes,” I said. A sickly sweet perfume stained the air, cloying and close. I glanced at the message in my hand, trying to identify the scent. Not roses. Violets? Lilac? The poppy on the wax seal stared back at me.

  Käthe squinted a little as she looked up from her work. “Is that an invitation?”

  “An invitation?” I frowned. “To what?”

  “His masked ball, of course. For Carnival.” Käthe tilted her head toward the pile of dresses around her. “It’s what half these gowns are for. The Count’s parties are infamous.” A sigh of longing escaped her lips. “Invitations are extremely difficult to come by, and the guest lists are kept secret, so no one knows who is to attend.”

  “What is infamous?” François asked.

  “It is, er”—I struggled to find the French word and failed— “it means well-known, though not necessarily in a good way.” Frau Messner’s words returned to me. The tales that come out of Procházka House are more incendiary than most.

  “C’est mal?” His brows knit together. “Bad?”

  “Infamous isn’t necessarily bad.” Käthe returned to her needlework. “People want to go to the Count’s parties.”

  “Why?” François turned to me.

  I shook my head. I wanted to know the answer as well.

  “Because,” Käthe said exasperatedly, “it’s the mystery that makes it exciting. No one knows exactly what happens at these parties, for the Count binds all his guests to secrecy.”

  “What?” I had never heard of such a ridiculous notion. “What on earth do they get up to at these soirees?”

  She shrugged, pushing a blond curl out of her eyes. “Oh, the clients tell all sorts of stories at Herr Schneider’s dress shop. The Procházkas sacrifice goats to a dark god in occult rituals. They drink laudanum to induce visions. They call upon sinister forces. There are also”—her cheeks pinked—“other, ah, salacious tales that emerge. Everyone is masked and anonymous, after all. People are keen to shed their inhibitions along with their identities.”

  Theirs is a house of madmen and dreamers.

  “Salacious?” François asked.

  Neither Käthe nor I answered him. “And you want to go?” For a brief moment, I thought of another masked ball my sister and I had attended, deep Underground, where I had seen her dance and laugh and party to wild excess on the arm of several comely young changelings. A flutter of anxiety and excitement flickered in my stomach.

  “Of course!” Käthe snorted. “You don’t think I truly believe those stories, do you? And besides, even if the Procházkas participated in arcane blood magic rituals, anything would be more exciting than being cooped up in these apartments, waiting for our lives to begin.”

  As apprehensive as I was about our benefactor, I could not gainsay her. Ever since we arrived in Vienna, we existed in a liminal state, always waiting for the next audition, the next chance, the next opportunity. Opportunities for musician work came in fits and starts, either feast or famine. For all that the Count could provide us with funds to live in Vienna, we were as dependent on public opinion as we were his generosity. What passed as talent in our small, provincial town in Bavaria was ordinary in here, for musicians in the city were as common as beer, and twice as cheap. Every week there was another concert, another salon, another gathering, another audience, and it was hard to make ourselves heard above the din.

  I held the message out before us. There was nothing to be gleaned from the letter itself; it was faintly perfumed in the same scent, written in the same elegant hand, and sealed with the same poppy seal as the first correspondence we received from our patron. All my misgivings and doubts rose to the fore. When we first heard from Count Procházka, I had been so eager to read news of Josef and so distracted by the unexpected windfall of fifty florins that I had overlooked troubling signs. The lengths to which he had gone to satisfy an obsession with my music. My stolen letters to my brother. The Count’s complete and utter disregard for my privacy. They all pointed to a man who seemed to have little consideration for boundaries.

  “Mademoiselle?” François lifted his brows. “Will you read or no?”

  With some hesitation, I turned the message over. For the first time, I noticed text printed in Roman type beneath the seal. HOSTIS VENIT FLORES DISCEDUNT. Latin. A motto? The words seemed vaguely familiar, but my Latin was rudimentary at best, useless outside the Mass.

  Printed on weighted card stock in Gothic black letter were the words BLACK & WHITE CARNIVAL.

  And then, in that flowing, flawless hand:

  Mlle Elisabeth Vogler is requested to attend the BALL at Procházka House, on the night of Shrove Tuesday, at FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE EVE NING.

  An invitation. Four of them, each addressed to a different person. Me. Mssr François Saint-Georges. Mlle Katharina Vogler. My heart clenched. Mssr Josef Vogler.

  “Well?” Käthe bit off her thread and tied a knot. “Don’t keep us waiting, Liesl.”

  “You were
right, Käthe,” I said softly. I handed her the invitation with her name. “We’ve been invited to one of Count Procházka’s infamous balls.”

  My sister squealed in excitement. “I knew it!” She tossed aside the gown on which she had been working. “Take that, Frau Drucker,” she gloated to the crumpled silk. “I am personally acquainted with Count Procházka!”

  I gave François his invitation. He met my gaze. “Josef?” he asked.

  I closed my eyes. “I don’t know,” I said in a small voice. “I don’t know . . . I don’t know if he would want to come.”

  François sighed, and in the depths of his sigh, I heard what he did not say. I don’t know what Josef wants these days.

  I didn’t either. Not anymore. I wasn’t sure if I ever had. I opened my eyes. The rooms were small, cramped, crowded, but I felt my brother’s absence from this scene as acutely as a missing tooth. He should have been here. He should have been with us, part of the new family we were building here. An irrational surge of anger and irritation spiked my blood. Josef should at least try to make a new life. I was trying. François was trying. Käthe was trying and seemed to have nearly succeeded. Even if my brother and I were both struggling to take root in Vienna, we used to struggle together when we were children. Now we were alone. Isolated.

  “The Count could have invited us sooner,” Käthe grumbled. “We’ll have no time to make our own costumes.” She was already furiously sketching her ideas for our fancy dress onto a spare bit of foolscap. An old draft of the Wedding Night Sonata that I had discarded in a fit of frustration and fury. I waited for the sharp stab of jealousy or resentment to see my sister turn my failure into a new work of art, but there was nothing. Only a sense of emptiness.

  “What of your work for Monsieur Schneider?” François asked Käthe.

  She turned an imperious blue gaze on each of us in turn. “I fully expect the two of you to pull your weight around here,” she said primly. “And leave me to my genius.”

  I would have laughed if I didn’t feel so bereft of my own creative spark. “Yes, ma’am.” I gathered the discarded gowns and moved them to the table in the next room where François joined me, resigned to another long night by the candle.

  “And if Josef comes back,” she called after us, “tell him he’s not exempt!”

  François and I exchanged another glance. Not when Josef came back.

  If.

  FAULTLINES

  the third candle was halfway gone when Josef finally returned.

  I had sent François to bed a candle and a half ago and moved my work to the front room. All those hours of mending and sewing I had neglected in favor of music had come back to haunt me, for although my fingers were nimble enough on a keyboard or strings, they were hopeless with a needle and thread. But while I was determined to help my sister in any way I could, I had been even more determined to confront my brother the moment he came home.

  “Where have you been?” I kept my voice low, so as not to disturb François. Käthe and I shared the other room while the boys slept in the front.

  Josef paused in unlacing his boots. “Nowhere,” he said. His tone was expressionless, but it was a calculated sort of neutral that spoke volumes.

  Although the light of the candle did not reach far, I thought I could see the dark tracks of mud on the soles of his shoes and at the hem of his greatcoat. “Liar,” I said calmly, keeping my head bent over my needlework. “You’ve been to the cemetery again, I see.”

  My brother stiffened. “Yes,” he said. “It is the only place in this godforsaken city where I can breathe.”

  St. Marx Cemetery was some two and a half miles from the outer city walls. It was also the only bit of wildness within any easy distance, with stretches of open space and trees and grass and nary another person in sight but the dead underfoot.

  “I know,” I said quietly.

  And I did. No matter where you turned, you were never more than a half step away from your neighbor and your neighbor’s business. Horses, pedestrians, and gutter refuse lined the streets, alleyways, and boulevards. Everyone trod the same mud, muck, and filth, breathing the same sour-smelling air, and around every corner was another stranger, another potential for danger that was to be avoided. There was no room, no space, no place to be alone, to think, to be. I was as hemmed in by the ring of stone that encircled the city as I had ever been trapped Underground as the Goblin King’s bride.

  Josef’s shoulders relaxed, but his posture was still wary. “It feels like . . . it feels like home out there.”

  Home. Until we arrived, I had never given much thought to the idea of home. For most of my life, home was where I lived and the people I loved. Home had been the inn and my family.

  Home had been the Goblin Grove and a soft-eyed young man.

  “I know,” was all I said. It was all I could say.

  Josef said nothing. The silence between us was pointed, its jabs meant for me. I had no defense against my brother’s coldness, and I felt each and every absent word like a knife between the ribs. Vienna had become our Tower of Babel, our speech broken by my mania and his melancholy. But it was more than communication that was missing between us; it was communion. Once Josef and I would have spent the quiet hours together without speaking, simply being with each other in the moment. Once he would have picked up his bow and I my hands, and we would have spoken across sound, across melody, across music. Once, once, once.

  All was silent.

  I watched my brother set down his violin case by the door. “You’ve been playing, I see.”

  Talk to me, Sepp. Look at me. Acknowledge me.

  He did not turn to face me. “And you haven’t been composing, I see.”

  I hissed as I stabbed myself deeply with the needle. A drop of blood blossomed across the surface of the silk on which I was working, looking like poppy petals in the snow. I cursed under my breath. Several hours of work ruined. I did not know what I would tell Käthe when she awoke.

  Josef’s face was unreadable beyond the edge of the candle flame. “Soak it with cold salt water,” he said. He made his way to the cabinets where we kept our spices, and returned with a rag and a bowl filled with a bit of salt. He retrieved the pitcher of water from the washstand and poured a measure into the bowl. Taking my sewing from me, he dipped the tip of his rag in the solution and began dabbing at the stain.

  How did he know to do this? Where? So much of my brother’s time away from me was a complete mystery. What he had learned under Master Antonius. What he had done in those weeks after the old virtuoso died and he had disappeared into the depths of Vienna. I had asked François once, but it was the only time our shared understanding had ever failed. Neither boy could tell me what had happened to them. Could not. Would not.

  The faintest trace of healing red welts flashed across the skin of my brother’s pale forearm as he worked. I sucked in a sharp breath. “Sepperl . . .”

  The use of his childhood nickname made him pause, but when he caught me staring at his wrists, he was quick to pull down his sleeve. “You can do the rest,” he said shortly, shoving my sewing back at me.

  “Sepp, I—”

  “Do you need anything else, Elisabeth?” he asked. “If not, I will be off to bed.”

  The use of my given name was a slap to the face. I had always been Liesl to him, only and ever Liesl. “I need . . .” I began, but trailed off. I need you to come back to me. I need you to be whole. I need you in order to be whole. “I need you to talk to me, Sepp.”

  He looked me squarely in the face. “What could I possibly have to say to you?”

  A sob caught in my throat. “How could you possibly be so cruel?”

  “Me, cruel?” He laughed, and the sound was a little feral, a little wild. “Oh, Liesl. It is you who are cruel. It is you who lie. Not me. Not I.”

  I blinked the tears from my eyes. “How have I been cruel, Sepperl?”

  The light in his icy blue gaze shone with something like contempt, even mal
ice. I was taken aback. The youth who stood before me was no longer the child I knew. Since being reunited, I had marked how my brother had grown: lean and lanky with his height, the last of his baby fat withered from his smile to reveal sharp cheekbones and an even sharper chin. But it was more than the visible changes time had wrought upon him that made him unfamiliar to me; it was the invisible ones that turned him into a stranger. I wondered then what my real brother—the one stolen by changelings—would have looked like now. I immediately quashed the treacherous thought, furious with myself for even thinking it.

  “Is this where you want to have our reckoning?” Josef’s voice was quiet. It was an unquiet quiet, the hush before a winter storm. “Because we can have it now. Right this moment. With both François and our sister to overhear.”

  I glanced to the sleeping boy in the bed beside the table. François’s eyes were closed, but there was a waiting stillness to every line of his body. He was listening. The door to the room I shared with Käthe was cracked open a sliver, and I caught the reflected gleam of her summer-blue eyes before they winked out into darkness. I looked away.

  “I thought so.” Josef’s face was hard.

  “Fine,” I said. “Be off to bed then. I shall see you in the morning.” I shoved my sewing to the side and made to blow out the candle when I felt my brother’s hand about my wrist.

  “Liesl.” His voice cracked, leaping several octaves as it hadn’t in several months now, unexpectedly young and vulnerable. “I . . . I—”

  I held my breath. A gossamer-fragile truce, a filament of peace, and I dared not exhale lest I disturb it altogether.

  The moments stretched on, and beneath and between us, a growing chasm.

  “I wish you good night,” my brother said at last.

  I shut my eyes. “Good night, Josef.”

  He blew out the candle. I made my way to my own bed, stumbling through the dark.

  And then a voice from the shadows, so soft I could have imagined it: