Shadowsong

by S. Jae-Jones

  All save one.

  Sitting at Der Erlkönig’s feet is a fair-haired youth, long-limbed and lanky, with sharp cheekbones and an even sharper chin. Of all the changelings around me, his are the only eyes that look human. Clear as water and blue, blue, blue.

  Josef.

  But I don’t recognize my brother. Where the expressions of the other goblins and fey creatures of the Underground are books I can read, Josef’s is like trying to find words in a painting. The flame in my chest stutters and sputters with my uncertainty.

  “Welcome home, my queen.” Der Erlkönig’s thin lips unfurl into a sneer, teeth glinting in the changeable, mercurial light of the Underground. “Have you missed us?” The sneer sharpens, his eyes turning glacial. “Have you missed me?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I have longed for you every minute, every hour, of my waking days.”

  Color flares briefly in those eyes, a lightning flash of depth and dimension. “And your sleepless nights?”

  Lust ripples through my veins, my blood a murmuring brook of want. The monster before me is beautiful in his ugliness, and I imagine those corrupted hands curled around me, our skin alternating black and white like the keys of my klavier. The candle within me glows brighter.

  “My nights are spent running from my desire for you. For devastation. For oblivion.”

  Der Erlkönig gets to his feet. “Yes.” He sighs, the sound drawn out in a sibilant whisper that slithers about my loins. “Yes.”

  Yes, please, yes. I walk forward as Der Erlkönig descends from the dais. I bare my throat to him in submission, waiting for the wolf’s bite that will spill my life’s blood onto the floor. He wraps those multijointed hands about my arms and pulls me close, pressing his lips against where my pulse flutters beneath the skin, breathing deep the scent of my mortality.

  His fingertips are licks of flame that leave chilblains in their wake, my flesh turning dead-white and deadweight beneath his touch. Claws find my every crevice, as though he can dig into me and tear me apart. I laugh with a scream.

  “No!” Josef leaps upon Der Erlkönig’s back, breaking his grip on me. “Leave her alone! You’re hurting her!”

  As the Lord of Mischief steps away, I feel something hot running down my chin. I touch my face and my fingertips come away wet and red.

  A nosebleed.

  The world slips and slides around me, and when I lift my hands, I can see straight through my skin down to the muscles and blood and bone of my flesh. Der Erlkönig is stripping away who I am, layer by layer. I laugh again, and my laughter emerges from Der Erlkönig in a chuckle as he turns to my brother.

  “Does she not deserve to be hurt? Does she not deserve to be destroyed? Have not those very thoughts crossed your own head, O nameless one?”

  Josef looks to me, but I still cannot understand the words of his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” Der Erlkönig asks him. “Why have you come?”

  “I . . . I’ve come home,” Josef says, the pitch of his voice softer than the sound of my thoughts.

  Der Erlkönig throws his head back with a roar of mirth and contempt. “Did you think it would be so easy, changeling? To shed the life of the mortal you once were? I see the strings that still tie you to the world above. To her.”

  His eyes dart my way, and I see the bonds of blood that have wrapped themselves in a stranglehold about my brother’s neck and chest, slowly draining him of joy. They are tied to the candle in my own chest.

  “Why do you still wear his face, mischling?” Der Erlkönig taunts. Halfling, half-blood, mongrel, I watch my brother bleed shame and agony. “Show us your real self!”

  Josef pales. “This—this is my real self.”

  “Is it?” The Lord of Mischief steps closer to my brother, and I see Josef flinch against that bitter breath. His winter’s gaze caresses my brother’s face, and those broken-jointed fingers run their tips lightly across Josef’s brow. “Those eyes are still human, mischling. Shall I pluck them out for you?”

  “No!” My shout is a blade, my body a shield as I place myself between my brother and the Goblin King. “You shall not touch him.”

  For the briefest of moments, Der Erlkönig’s glacier eyes melt to reveal the man frozen behind them. His emotions take on the tang of death and mortality, not the clean, crisp taste of the fey and everlasting life.

  “Would you save him?” he asks, and his voice is a kitten in my hand, soft and defenseless and vulnerable. “Would you choose him?”

  Der Erlkönig’s lips say one thing, but his words say another. Would you choose me? I hear them both, the man and the monster, and I cannot untangle one from the other.

  “Why should I choose?” I ask instead. “Can I not save you both?”

  The shadows writhe on Der Erlkönig’s skin, rustling and hissing like a nest of snakes. As one, the gathering of goblins inhales a sharp breath. The air weighs heavy in my lungs, and I drown in tension and fear as the crawling darkness gathers itself around the Goblin King’s body. He screams in E-flat, iron nails of agony driving into my eardrums as he clutches his head.

  Josef begins to keen in pain, a diminished second to the Goblin King’s scream, jarring and dissonant and grating against where I keep my love for him. My brother claws at his eyes as shadows begin to spill from them in blue-black tears, staining them onyx and obsidian.

  Behind them both, the Wild Hunt begin to laugh, clapping their rusted blades against their shields in a pounding rhythm. Shrieks and cries rise up in a cacophony of torture and torment from the changelings and goblins assembled around me, limbs cracking, fingers breaking, bodies bent and reshaped into a giant mass of grasping hands to form a mouth, a nose, eyes, a face. The unholy host dissolves into mist, and the collective face breathes in deep, the wights and riders vanishing into fog. Its eyes open, glowing blue-white in the cavernous ballroom, and I know just what it is I am facing.

  The old laws made flesh.

  So you have returned to us, Goblin Queen. The voice is legion, a jumble of pitches and tones and notes. If I were not already mad, I might have lost my mind at the sight of its grotesqueness.

  “I have come,” I say, “to claim what you have stolen.”

  The eyebrows wrought of fingers and eyeballs lift, the edge of a lip made of elbows and toes curling into an ironic expression. And what is that?

  I look to Josef. I look to the Goblin King.

  “My heart.”

  The Goblin King stirs at the words and lifts his head to meet my gaze. A kindling gaze, and it stokes the flames in my rib cage. It flickers and throbs, and I can almost hear it whisper a name.

  Your heart? The old laws laugh, a hideous shriek and cackle of a myriad goblin voices. You have but one, mortal.

  I wrap my hands around the candle in my chest. “It is big enough to warm them both. It is big enough to warm the world.”

  Liar. The word flies from its lips and shatters against the stony walls of the cavern, scattering sharp jibes and jeers everywhere. Liar, liar, liar.

  Such a pretty lie. But we know the ugly truth of you, Goblin Queen. We know of your overweening arrogance, your thoughtlessness, and your utter, selfish disregard for anything other than your own feelings. We know how you walked away from this pitiful vessel before us—a finger flicks in the Goblin King’s direction—to leave him to deterioration and decay. We also know how you took this sorry changeling—another finger toward Josef—and corrupted him with your love.

  Josef whimpers, black ink running down his cheeks. The whites of his eyes are already lost to the Underground, and the blue of his human irises swim in darkness.

  Look at that pathetic, mewling thing, the old laws sneer. This is what thou hath wrought, Goblin Queen.

  Madness is an escape from boundaries, from inhibitions, from my own self-doubt, but I cannot escape my self-loathing. I did not know until that moment how reason had been my shield against the worst of my own excesses, the unbridled muchness of me. Shadows coil around my wrists an
d throat, my fingers breaking and twisting into gnarled branches.

  The covenant is broken, the old laws croon. And it is your fault. Your fault, your fault, your fault. But you can make it right.

  “How?” I cry.

  The limbs and teeth and fingers and eyes and toes that make up the old laws’ face bubble and ripple, a skittering mass that breaks apart and re-forms into an enormous pair of hands, cupped together to offer me something in its palms. It is a smaller pair of hands, holding a dagger in its grip.

  A life for a life, the old laws say. It is what we are owed.

  I look to the Goblin King.

  I look to Josef.

  Choose, maiden. Choose your austere young man . . . or your brother.

  The hands gripping the dagger stretch and grow, a branch, a sapling, a tree. The old laws offer me the blade, an ancient weapon, forged not from steel, but hewn from stone. It is simple, it is crude, it is cruel.

  Choose, maiden, the old laws repeat. Pay the price, and the other goes free.

  I take the dagger.

  Yessssssssssssssss, they hiss. Make your choice.

  I turn to my brother. His skin is clear, his bones wrought of glass, his blood of water. Where a candle ought to have burned in his chest, there is nothing, a black hole, a swamp. Marsh light flickers there, blue and ethereal, the ghost of flame.

  I turn to the Goblin King. The shadows have left him utterly, leaving him horrifically scarred and disfigured, but his eyes are brilliant, bright, full. A candle lies in his rib cage, cold and dark, as though waiting for a breath to fan it to life.

  Make your choice, the old laws demand.

  The Goblin King looks at me, his lips curled up like a sleeping cat, cozy and sweet. He does not speak, but I hear him anyway.

  Choose him. Choose your brother.

  I look to Josef. I still cannot read the language of his features, but he shakes his head. “Let me go,” he tells me. “Give me up.”

  The dagger in my hand is more than a weapon; it is a compass needle. It points me in the direction of my heart. I press the tip to my chest.

  The mass of goblins shift, hesitancy in their voice. What are you doing?

  “I am making my choice,” I whisper.

  And drive the dagger deep into myself.

  INSIDE OUT

  there is no pain, only a sigh of relief. I cut through the cage of bones that surround my candle, and reach inside. The flame is sure and steady, and I hold it aloft, illuminating the space around me.

  The cavern is gone, and I am alone. I am back in the hedge maze at Procházka House, but the shrubs are made of memories, the path of poppies. I tread on the souls of the stolen and sacrificed as I walk through the winding paths of my mind. Thoughts burst underfoot like bubbles, leaving bits of feeling in my wake as the flowers sigh their names.

  Ludvik

  Adelaide

  Erik

  Samuel

  Magda

  But as I wend and wind my way through the labyrinth, I realize I am walking in a river of blood, the walls of the Daedalian pathways built of bone. The hedges and bramble vines pulse and throb and breathe, warm and slick to the touch. Like skin. Like flesh.

  Ich bin der umgedrehte Mann.

  I am the inside-out man.

  There is a glow emanating from the center of the labyrinth, and I follow the light, leaving the darkness behind me. As the corridors of the hedge maze open up, I find myself in a space very much like the ballroom at Snovin Hall—a beautiful, soaring cathedral of a space with light and glass and mirrors everywhere. The sunshine and moonlight and star glow of other worlds stream in through the windows, dust motes hanging upon the beams like fairy lights in the Underground. It is a sacred space, a sanctuary, and it is the holy hall of my heart.

  In the middle of my heart is an altar, a bronze basin of oil standing upon a wooden plinth carved into the shape of a tree. I touch my candle to the oil and set it ablaze, wondering if I were to meet some version of myself like a priestess, an oracle, or a queen.

  No one arrives.

  There is only me, my own inadequate self reflected in the mirrors around me.

  One of my reflections crooks a finger at me, beckoning me close. I obey, walking up to the girl in the mirror. I have long since made my peace with my own lack of beauty, but it is jarring to see my skin animated by another version of myself. I study my face with new eyes, as though I am a stranger to myself, finding myself both more and less critical of my features. The weak and pointed chin, the horselike nose, the thin lips are all still there, but the animated eyes and defined cheekbones are new. Or rather, they seem new, for when I speak, they are the first parts of myself I notice.

  The first parts other people see.

  Who are you? the reflection asks.

  “I am Liesl,” I reply.

  She shakes her head. Who am I?

  I blink. I remember a conversation—a game—I played with the Goblin King oh so long ago.

  I am a girl with music in her soul. I am sister, a daughter, a friend, who fiercely protects those dear to her. I am a girl who loves strawberries, chocolate torte, songs in a minor key, moments stolen from chores, and childish games.

  “You are Elisabeth, entire,” I say to my reflection.

  Her smile looks sad. Are you?

  Am I? As I turn to peer into each of the mirrors, I see a different facet of myself: the girl with music in her soul, the daughter, the friend, the sister. These are all parts of me, entire, yet I did not know until this moment how I had fractured myself, unable to understand how to fit these pieces together into a whole.

  There are mirrors, and there are windows, and through the windows I see different worlds, different lives, those precious people I have taken into myself. Mother, Constanze, and Papa can be seen through the windows to my family, while Käthe and François sit together in another. But of all these pretty pictures and vistas into other lives, only Käthe stares back.

  Liesl, she says.

  In her hand she holds a ring. I peer closer, and see it is the silver wolf’s-head ring I threw into Lorelei Lake, the one my austere young man gave to me as a promise.

  I keep you secret, she says. I keep you safe. Until the day you return to me, I hold your heart.

  Our hands meet palm to palm through the glass, our heads nodding in unison.

  The light fades in my sister’s window, but a candle continues to burn.

  I take a slow turn about the room then, looking through each window for glimpses of my brother or the Goblin King. But try as I might, I cannot find them, for there are myriad windows, myriad memories to sort through.

  You are looking in the wrong places, my reflection tells me.

  “Where should I look?” I ask her.

  Not out at the world, she says. But back at yourself.

  In the mirrors.

  Then I understand.

  Josef and the Goblin King are not their own, entire, but me. They are not real, but puppets of shadows and flesh. I did not see them as whole and human, for how could I, when they are the foundations upon which I stand?

  Choose, the old laws told me. Pay the price, and the other goes free.

  The sacrifice was not paid by my blood. It will be paid by my soul. To choose Josef or the Goblin King is to choose the part of me I am willing to give up: my brother, or my austere young man. The gardener of my heart, or my immortal beloved. My capacity for grace, or my potential for mercy.

  For Josef is my grace. He is the unprompted, unlooked for, unplanned stranger in the night, the one I fed and clothed and loved as my own. I am a better person for loving my brother, although I have done a poor job proving it to him or myself of late.

  “I’m sorry, Sepperl,” I say to my reflection. Her form ripples and changes, and standing before me is a changeling. He has my brother’s features and a goblin’s eyes. He smiles at me and tilts his chin over my shoulder. I turn around to face another mirror.

  The austere young man.


  It is not the same person I left on the cavern floor with my brother and the old laws. This man is different: younger, fresh-faced, his mismatched eyes as vivid and intense as new-dyed hues. Nor is he truly an austere young man, despite the sober and somber clothing he wears. There is the sparkle of mischief in his expression, and a twist of wickedness to his lips, yet in the depths of his eyes there is an agelessness that speaks of wisdom both learned and earned.

  “Who are you?” I whisper.

  He nods at me. You know who I am, Elisabeth.

  “You are a man with music in his soul,” I tell him. “You are the one who showed me a way to myself, when I was lost in the woods. My teacher, my playmate, my friend.” I choke a little on the sobs rising from my throat. “You allowed me to forgive myself for being imperfect. For being a sinner. For being me.”

  If my brother is my grace, then the Goblin King is my mercy. I look from one to the other. How can I possibly choose? I have fallen upon an ancient weapon, but how can I possibly cut out my own heart and survive?

  Josef steps forward, hand outstretched. The Goblin King steps forward as well, a mirror image to my brother. I hold out my hands to each, and their shapes blur and merge, until I can no longer tell which is my mercy and which is my grace. Perhaps they are both. Perhaps they are neither.

  Choose.

  And still I wait. Still I hesitate, unwilling to let go of either. Both.

  Choose.

  the maiden’s blood spilled over the cavern floor, a widening circle of crimson, scarlet, and vivid red. The changeling cried out and ran forward, placing his hands over her heart to stanch the bleeding.

  “Help me!” he cried out to the man on the dais. “Help me, please!”

  The man lurched upright, pale and wan and unsteady on his feet. The Goblin King. Without the power of the old laws thrumming through his veins, he looked strangely diminished. Less frightening, less otherworldly, less . . . just less. For his entire mortal life, the changeling had heard tales of this man—this uncanny figure—who could bend space and time and the laws of reality as the world knew it, yet the Goblin King who stood before him was not a myth. He was just a man.