by S. Jae-Jones
We sat in silence with our coffees for a while, me sipping gingerly, the Count gulping his down. I wasn’t much for breakfast either, but felt I had to eat for courtesy’s sake. I set my cup down and walked to the sideboard to fill a plate with a few small, cookie-sized pastries topped with a sweet poppy seed paste. The room in which we sat was one of the few better-maintained parts of the house, the furniture sturdy if shabby, the rug of high quality if threadbare. Two sets of windowed doors framed the fireplace, opening onto a terrace that overlooked wildly overgrown lands. Like the dining room, a painting or a mirror was hung above the sideboard, and as with the rest of the framed objects in the house, it was covered with a sheet.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, pointing to the framed object, “may I ask what it is you keep covered under there?”
The Count coughed, choking a bit on his coffee. “Now, now,” he said, face reddening. “Mustn’t touch.”
Another voice from another time returned to me, whispering the same words. No, no, mustn’t touch. I thought of the mirror in my chamber Underground, my enchanted window to the world above.
After a few more minutes of coughing and clearing his throat, the Count continued. “It’s not a painting or a portrait, my dear,” he said. “It’s a mirror.”
I was surprised. “A mirror?”
“You may consider it a silly old superstition,” he said sheepishly, “but around these parts, it is ill luck to keep mirrors uncovered in empty rooms and while the house is sleeping.”
“Why?”
He gave a nervous laugh. “Oh, it’s an old wives’ tale, but they say that if the mirrors aren’t covered, a dreamer’s soul may accidentally wander through them to the shadow world and become trapped.” The Count gave the one hanging above the mantel a sidelong glance. “One never knows where one’s soul might end up. The realm behind the reflection may or may not be true, and they say the fey and the spirits of the restless dead travel through the shadow-world paths created by mirrors.”
I shivered, thinking of how I had spied upon my brother and sister through the enchanted mirror in my chamber Underground. Suddenly, I understood the why of it. One never knew just who was staring back as you gazed into your reflection.
“Are you frightening our guests, Otto?” The Countess emerged from the hall, limping into the room on Konrad’s arm. “Don’t believe everything he tells you,” she said. “Otto does love a good story.”
He gave his wife a tender smile. “Especially ones with happy endings.”
The Countess rolled her eyes. “My husband is a sentimental fool, I’m afraid,” she said, but she could not keep the smile from her voice. “I myself prefer the old tales. Wouldn’t you agree, mademoiselle?” Konrad helped the Countess to her seat while her husband rose to his feet and made his wife a cup of coffee.
“I would prefer it if we dispensed with the storytelling and went straight to truth seeking, if you don’t mind,” I said tartly. “What are we doing here? Why? How?”
She sighed and set down her cup after a sip. “I had hoped to get settled in before all that.”
“Get you acquainted with Snovin,” the Count added. “You are our guest, so please make yourself comfortable and at home here.”
I lifted my brows. “And how long will my stay be?”
“Until the danger to you is passed,” the Countess said. “And in order to make sure you’re safe, we need your help, Elisabeth. You are far more precious to us than you know.”
“Precious?” I laughed incredulously. “To you? Why?”
“Because of what you are,” she said seriously. “And what I am.”
“What I am,” I repeated. “The Goblin Queen.”
The Countess nodded. “There is kinship between us.”
“Kinship?” I was surprised. “Who are you?”
She glanced at the Count, who met her gaze briefly, then returned his eyes back to his plate. “I presume you do not mean to ask about the illustrious house of Procházka und zu Snovin, of which my husband is the nineteenth count and I, his wife.”
I crossed my arms. The Countess sighed again.
“We are—I am,” she began, “the last of a line no less old or illustrious than my husband’s, if not quite so noble. The Procházkas have ever kept watch over the in-between places and thresholds of the world, but my family have been the keeper of its secrets. We keep the old laws and we safeguard them, maintaining the balance between our world and the Underground.”
I frowned. “How?”
“I told you that those of us touched by Der Erlkönig can reach across the barrier.” She held her hands apart. “We can find the windows and”—she clapped her hands shut—“close them. You can do this, Elisabeth,” she said, nodding toward me. “As can I.”
“You?” She nodded again. I narrowed my eyes. “What are you?”
The Countess and her husband exchanged another glance. This time, he held her gaze and gave her the slightest of nods. She turned back to me, those eyes of hers large, luminous, and an impossibly bright green. “I am of his blood,” she said in a low voice. “My foremother was the first of his brides. A brave maiden, who gave her life for the world, then doomed that very same world to bring Der Erlkönig back from death.”
a voice from the deep places of the world called his name and Josef awoke. The sun was streaming in through windows and past curtains he had forgotten to close the night before, long past morning but not yet noon. For a moment, he thought he was back home at the inn, for the air held the faint, crisp freshness of pine and dirt and snow.
And then he remembered.
The weight of his argument with Liesl pressed heavily on his chest, pushing him back into his bed linens, a suffocating pressure that made it hard to breathe and to get out of bed.
During their entire flight from Vienna, Josef had sensed his sister’s unease, her anxiety, her manic restlessness at the uncertainty of their futures. He had sensed it, and tried to care. But he didn’t. Couldn’t. He knew that he ought to be worried, he ought to have been frightened, for the revelations the Procházkas had bestowed upon them were alarming and unbelievable. Yet at the same time, the effort it took him to muster anything beyond vague concern was exhausting, and Josef had been tired for a long, long time.
He contemplated staying in bed all day. There were no places to go, no people to see, no auditions to prepare for. There were, he realized, no expectations set upon him. He waited for happiness, for excitement, or even relief, but there was nothing but the same dull indifference that had plagued him since he left Bavaria. Since he left home.
But years of rising early to practice the violin were still buried deep within his muscles and bones. Josef shook off the remnants of sleep and roused himself, finding a clean set of clothes outside his door. He had not yet learned how to fill his hours without music, and the itch and the urge to play lingered in his fingers. He got dressed and picked up his violin.
Liesl was already gone by the time he left his room, and the housekeeper from the previous night was nowhere to be found. There was absolutely no one else in sight as he wandered through the wings and halls of Snovin, which suited Josef just fine. He had never been able to hear himself think in the presence of anyone else save his eldest sister and François. It was why he found playing in front of an audience so intolerable.
As Josef passed from room to room, the manor’s state of decay became more and more noticeable. Shafts of light cut through the collapsed roofs and empty windows, dust motes dancing in the sunbeam like fairy lights. Winter still had its hold on this mountainous estate, but he didn’t mind the cold. It was calm. Clean, despite the dirt and twigs and creatures scurrying underfoot. It put him in mind of the forest just beyond the inn, a vast change from the filthy, smelly, and crowded homes in the city. Here he could play. Here he could find communion within himself again.
But despite the ease and familiarity he felt within these inside-out walls, he couldn’t find the right place to pul
l his violin from its case. He was searching for the sense of sacredness that had come with the Goblin Grove. He was seeking sanctuary.
“Help me,” he whispered to no one in particular. “Help me find peace.”
A clock chimed the hour.
To his right stood a grandfather clock, its face painted and gilded with the movement of the heavens. Its hands were not pointed to an hour, despite its sounding gong, and Josef could have sworn the spheres moving across their heavenly paths were still just a moment before. Behind him, there was a soft, grinding, clicking sound, the faint scream of rusted metal over metal. He turned to look.
A suit of armor was lifting its arm.
Tales of enchanted goblin-made armor rose up in his mind, imbued with a magic that made its wearer impervious to arrows and injuries and death. Such stories also came with accounts of fearsome fighting prowess, of the warrior defeating off hordes of the enemy with a skill in battle that was either preternatural or pretend. Not real. Not truly belonging to the warrior, but to the Underground.
Josef watched with detached fascination as the suit of armor lifted its arm, curled its fingers, and pointed down one of the corridors as if in answer to his question.
Help me. Help me find peace.
“That way?” he asked, mirroring the armor’s gesture.
Its empty, helmeted head moved up, then down, then up, then down in a herky-jerky motion, a grotesque parody of a nod.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
He followed the path of the armor’s direction, walking down a long, dark, high-ceilinged corridor toward a set of large double doors, opened ajar. Light spilled in through the crack, but shakily, unsteadily, as though shadows moved in the room beyond. He reached the doors, placed his hands on the ornately carved knockers, and pushed.
It was a ballroom.
The space was empty, although shadows still danced at the corners of his vision. A circular room paneled with many large, broken mirrors, the ballroom reflecting both light and movement like a prism. The cracked marble floors rippled with growing roots, dead ivy and desiccated vine crawling down the walls like fingers reclaiming the room. Josef and the wild were mirrored over and over, a thousand boys standing in a forest.
“Yes,” he breathed. If this place was not yet peace, then it was a balm to his soul: a room once dedicated to music and dance, now slowly becoming swallowed by the living, sleeping green. Twelve mirrored panels around him, like the twelve alder trees encircling the Goblin Grove; it felt both familiar and foreign. Back when he was a boy, before Master Antonius, before Vienna, before all the weight and expectations placed upon him, Josef had played his music in a place like this.
He set his case down and opened it, lifting his violin to his shoulder. He had no gloves and his fingers were cold, but Josef had long perfected the art of playing through numbness. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the scent of dirt and dust and deep woods filling his lungs. With the bow poised over his strings, he smiled. Then played.
And the world changed.
If there was anything left in his life that Josef loved, it was this. Music. The only thing of human invention he preferred to that of nature’s creation. Birdsong and cricket choruses had been the orchestra of his childhood, but his sister’s music had always been his star. His first soloist. When she sang him lullabies in the dark. When she wrote him little melodies to practice on the violin. It was as though he had learned to speak through the notes and lines and staff on the page. Language without words. Communion without communication.
The brambles and branches stirred at the sound of the violin. A sense of wakefulness came to a world deep in winter slumber, the intake of a breath before rousing. Beneath him and around him, the forest reached, stretched, grew, as though answering a call. The broken mirrored panels showed myriad boys amidst myriad trees, but Josef did not notice that all but one played the same song.
He transitioned from warmups and exercises to the largo from Vivaldi’s L’inverno, which had been his favorite piece since he was very young. Yet as his bow sang the notes, Josef felt distant. Removed. He could no longer remember why he had loved or cared so for this movement, only that the thrill of its melody was now gone. He thought of his father then, a man for whom one drink, then two, then three, then four or five or six had ceased to be enough. Had ceased to affect him.
The memory of his father marred Josef’s playing, and he hit a sour note. He stopped playing, and all the boys in the mirrors went still.
All save one.
Although Josef had lowered his instrument and his bow, still the sound of the violin carried on. Not an echo, but a reflection. The melody was familiar. Beloved. Cherished.
Der Erlkönig.
Emotion blossomed in Josef’s chest—pain, fear, guilt, relief, excitement, tenderness. His sister’s music had a way of opening him up to feeling, of digging up the parts of himself he had left buried back home in the Goblin Grove. He turned and searched for Liesl—to apologize, to reach out for solace or comfort—but he was alone, with only a thousand versions of himself to keep him company. A thousand blue eyes and a thousand violins stared back at Josef as he gazed into the shattered mirrors, but at the corner of his eye, one of the other Josefs moved.
He turned and turned, but as it was with the way of reflections, the perspective shifted and changed with every movement of his head. It was only when he kept still, when the other Josefs stopped turning, that he could see one of them coming closer. He tried to catch his own eye, but his reflection remained on the edges of his vision, on the edges of his sanity.
Minutes. Hours. It wasn’t until Der Erlkönig ended that he was face to face with his errant reflection. The other Josef wore a smile on his face that wasn’t mirrored on his own, and he held his violin on the opposite side. Or perhaps the correct side. He no longer knew what was left and right in this inside-out world.
“Who are you?” Josef asked, but his reflection’s mouth did not move in time with his.
I am you, the other Josef replied.
“And who am I?” he whispered.
The reflection only smiled.
THE BRAVE MAIDEN’S TALE, REPRISE
the brave maiden.
I was sitting with a descendant of the brave maiden. The first of us to die, and the only one of us survive the Goblin King’s embrace.
Until me.
“You . . . you . . .” I began, but my words trailed off into nothingness.
“Me, me,” the Countess repeated, although there was no hint of mockery in her voice. “Yes, Goblin Queen,” she said softly. “She walked away from the Underground, and lived. I am proof. And for hundreds of years, for several generations, her daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters were guardians and keepers of the balance between worlds, between the world above and the realms below.”
The crash and thunder of my beating heart hollowed out my ears, drowning all sound and sense. I watched the Countess’s lips move, but could not understand, could not comprehend a single word coming from her mouth. The notion was too big—too significant—to accept. The world narrowed to a small, singular idea.
I was not alone.
“Child? Child?” The scope and scale of my thoughts widened once more to encompass the chair I was sitting on, the room I was in, the person who was speaking to me. “My dear, are you all right? You look quite pale. Konrad, would you bring Mademoiselle Vogler something stronger than coffee to drink? A bit of sherry, perhaps?”
“I’m fine,” I said in a voice that didn’t sound like mine. It came from a place both far inside and outside of me, a voice so calm as to belong to another Liesl, another Elisabeth altogether. “I don’t need a drink.”
She watched me with those vivid, otherworldly green eyes. A jumble of half-started images and words and phrases tumbled through my mind—wife? child? Der Erlkönig’s child? legacy family descendants found uprooted—the noise spinning into a blur of blankness. I blinked, and when I did no
t respond to her extraordinary claim in the manner she was apparently expecting, the Countess gave a little huff.
“Well,” she said, forcing a laugh, “this is not the reception to my revelation I had hoped for.”
“What was to be my response?” I asked, still in that stranger’s voice.
She gave an elegant shrug. “Surprise? Shock? Gratitude? Anger? Anything other than blankness, to be honest, my dear.”
The Count cleared his throat. “It is a lot to take in, darling.”
He was right. It was too much for my limited comprehension to encompass wholly, so I could only pick at the details as they became clear to me, one by one.
“Are you—are you a child of Der Erlkönig?” Surely that wasn’t possible. A goblin girl told me long ago that no union of mortal and the Goblin King had ever been fruitful. And yet. My hand went to my lower belly. My bleeding had run their monthly courses as usual when I returned from the Underground. I felt a sharp stab of . . . envy? Relief? Emptiness? Exultation?
The Countess shook her head. “No, Elisabeth. I am not a child of Der Erlkönig, unless you mean it in the sense that we—you, your brother, my husband, all those who believe, and I—are all his children. No,” she repeated, her voice growing soft and gentle. “I am a descendant of the Goblin Queen and her consort, a man who had once been the Lord of Mischief and the Ruler Underground. A daughter of a mortal woman . . . and a mortal man.” She looked to her husband, and he laid a hand on her shoulder.
“But they were both mortal . . .” I did not know how to phrase my question, or even what to ask. If what she said was true. If she indeed had powers spanning both the worlds above and below. If, if, if.
“How do I have my gift of opening and closing the barriers between worlds?” the Countess finished.
I nodded.
“Do you know the tale of Persephone?” she asked.
I blinked. “No,” I said slowly, feeling even more lost and unmoored than before. “I don’t believe so.”
“She was the daughter of Demeter,” the Count chimed in. Unlike his wife, his dark eyes were fixed on my face with a strange sort of compassion, even pity. “She was abducted by Hades and forced to become his bride.”