THE END OF THE WORLD
“elisabeth!”
I struggled to open my eyes, feeling as though they were each weighted down and sealed shut with iron. I was overwhelmed by the strong smell of ammonia, my lungs involuntarily seizing as I try to draw in large breaths of stale, flat air. Nausea roiled my stomach, and I rolled over, retching out my guts.
“Ugh!” Someone made a disgusted noise beside me, but nothing but bile burned my throat.
“She’s awake,” said another voice. Female. Familiar. “Put that away, the smell is quite putting me off my supper.”
Slowly, as the waves of nausea subsided, my senses began to return. I was lying on something soft and plush, a luxurious velvet rubbing against my cheek. Whatever I was lying on was moving, rocking me back and forth, back and forth, like a boat on the sea. A rattling noise filled my head, clop-clop-scritch, clop-clop-scritch. My fingers were curled around something small, hard, and round. I cracked open my eyes, my vision blurry and hazy, hand unfurling to reveal something glinting silver in my palm. Two chips of blue and green winked at me.
A ring.
His ring.
It was then I recognized the rattling noise as the clop-clop-scritch of horseshoes on gravel, the swaying beneath me as the bouncing of a carriage. I quickly closed my hand over the Goblin King’s promise as I sat up with a start, wincing as a sharp pain lanced through my skull.
“Liesl?” It was my brother’s voice, unstrung and ragged with worry.
“Sepp?” I croaked. He did not answer, but I felt his hand wrap around my closed fist, clammy despite the cold. “Where—what—”
“How are you feeling, my dear?” asked a kindly voice. With a herculean effort, I looked up to see the plump form of Count Procházka sitting before me, his skull’s-head mask still perched atop his head.
My throat was on fire, my mouth stuffed with cobwebs and cotton wool. “Like I’ve just been drugged,” I rasped.
“We did apologize,” said another. The Countess, her white dress gleaming in the darkness, her face in shadow. Only her vivid green eyes were visible, catching the dim light filtered through the curtains like a mirror. “The methods were uncouth, but we didn’t have time to explain.”
“Then explain now,” Josef said tersely. “Explain where you’re taking us and what you’ve done with François. And Käthe.”
Alarm rang in my chest, waves of fear resonating in my bones like a bell. It cleared away the remnants of fog from my mind and I leaned forward, yanking at the draperies that concealed us from the world outside. Moonlight poured into the carriage along with the cold, illuminating unfamiliar farms and fields wreathed in mist. We were hours—miles—from the city, judging by the empty, desolate, sparsely populated landscape rushing past.
“Do close those curtains, child,” the Countess said. “You’ll catch your death of a chill.”
“What have you done with my sister?” I demanded. “Our friend?” I thought of the stories circulating around the Procházkas, the mysterious disappearance of the young woman in their care, the suspicious death of a young man of their acquaintance.
“They’re fine,” the Count said. “I promise you they are alive and well. They are at Procházka House at the moment. Our friends and associates shall care for them.”
“Have you drugged them too?” I asked sharply.
“They shall come to no harm,” he repeated.
“Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”
“You are forgiven.”
I turned my head to face the Countess, startled by the sight of her distinctive eyes in an unfamiliar face. Then I realized that she had removed her Frau Perchta mask, at last revealing her countenance entire. The Countess was not a young woman, perhaps ten or so years older than Mother. Her hair was dark and liberally streaked with gray, but her complexion was bright and clear, the bones of her face strong, giving her an ageless quality. She was not beautiful, exactly, but her features held the same old-fashioned elegance of many of those in the rural villages where I had grown up. It was not a delicate, refined face; it was the solid, high-cheeked, heavy-jawed face of a dairy wife or farm Frau.
“Your sister and your friend shall come to no harm,” the Countess said. “But the same cannot be said for you or your brother.”
Josef’s grip tightened, and the Goblin King’s ring bit into my palm. “Is that a threat?” I asked.
“No, Elisabeth,” she said. “Not a threat, but a warning. We are en route to our summer estate in Bohemia at the moment, a stronghold of our family. There are forces in the world that wish you harm, and it is our duty to protect you.”
“Protect us?” I was incredulous. “Why?”
“A covenant has been broken,” the Countess said, her face grim. “The old laws have been cheated of a proper sacrifice, and they have let the unholy host loose upon the world.”
Scraps of spectral flesh hanging on skeletal frames, eyes white with death, silver blood on my hands and a voice urging, Go. Run. Get away from here, lest the Hunt claim you.
“And you believe we are in danger?” I asked.
Her green gaze grazed my skin, stinging like the rays of the sun. “No. I know you are,” she said in a low, hard voice. “Goblin Queen.”
The words thudded in the thick air, heavy and portentous and accusatory. Silence came down like a curtain between us, muffling all thought, all feeling, all sensation. Josef hissed in surprise, drawing away from me as though he had been burned. Betrayed. The Count’s eyes darted between his wife and me, shrinking like a nervous rabbit caught between a hawk and a wolf.
“No,” I whispered. “How did you . . . I’m not . . .”
“Yes,” she hissed. Those green eyes were lit with fervor, crackling like St. Elmo’s fire. “Did you think you could walk away without facing the consequences?”
I shook my head. “He let me go.” My voice was small, remembering the last time I had seen the Goblin King, whole and entire, standing in the Goblin Grove with his hand upraised in farewell. “He let me go.”
The Countess scoffed. “And you believed him?”
I thought of the ring in my hand, but I dared not turn it over to study it, to verify that I had pulled a promise from a dream. “Yes,” I whispered.
“He is not the Lord of Mischief for nothing,” she said.
I thought of mismatched eyes fading to white, the image of a young man turning into a monster, his beautiful violinist’s hands contorting into claws, horns growing from the crown of his head. “He is so much more than that.”
“Liesl,” Josef said. “What is going on? What is happening? Goblin Queen? Unholy host? What does this all mean?”
I said nothing. I did not—could not—face my brother at the moment. I had once tried to tell him of my fantastic past, of my time beneath the earth as Der Erlkönig’s bride. I had bared my soul in writing, in words if not in notes, but Josef never received them. That letter had never reached him, along with the countless others I had sent, stolen by the woman before me. And now the rapport between my brother and me was broken. Muffled. Stifled. Silenced.
“It means nothing good, lad,” the Count said gently. “It means that we need to get you and your sister somewhere safe as soon as possible, away from the unholy host.”
Josef narrowed his eyes. “The unholy host?”
“They have many names.” The Count was the very picture of a bumbling, absentminded man, the kind people were apt to dismiss due to his amiability. Yet his black-button eyes were sharp, and a canny intelligence gleamed there, nearly lost to the smiling chubby cheeks. “Some know them as the Wild Hunt. Back home in Bohemia, we call it divoký hon. Your dark-skinned friend would know them as le Mesnée d’Hellequin, I should think.”
“Hellequin?” I thought of the figures of the commedia dell’arte, those black-and-white-masked players onstage as Columbine, as Pierrot, as Harlequin. I’d seen those costumes at the Procházkas’ ball. “Like the trickster?”
“Hellequin, Harlequin, the Italian Arlecchino, Dante’s devil Alichino, whom the Anglo-Saxons called herla cyning,” he said. “They are one and the same. You know him best, Fräulein, as Der Erlkönig.”
Josef sucked in a sharp breath. “The Goblin King.”
“Yes,” he said solemnly. “The ruler Underground.”
The ring in my palm. A promise made, a marriage troth broken. I curled my fingers even tighter, feeling the impression of the wolf’s-head dig into my hand like a brand.
“Then it’s true,” Josef whispered. He trembled in the seat next to me, but not with fear. With excitement. Eagerness. “What the legends have said. What our grandmother always told us. Der Erlkönig calls to us, beckons us to his side. It’s all true?”
The longing in my brother’s voice tugged at me, tangling the threads of guilt and love that were wound around my heart. We always come back in the end. Twin spots of red stained his cheeks, and his blue eyes shone like gems in the dark.
“Yes, young man.” The Countess looked grave. “It is all true. Which is why we have brought you here, so we can watch over you.”
The letter. The fifty florins. The apartments, the appointments, the auditions, the audiences. All arranged by the Countess. Every thing, down to the even, elegant handwriting that gave no clue as to the intentions of its author, was calculated for this. To bring me to Vienna. To bring me before her.
To the composer of Der Erlkönig. It was not my music the Countess had been after. I did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
“But why?” I asked her. “I am not the Goblin Queen, not anymore. I gave up that power. That responsibility.”
The Countess’s eyes glittered. “The old laws have not given you up, Elisabeth. Think you can remove the taint of the uncanny so easily? You have a gift, child. It makes you vulnerable.”
I frowned. “What gift?”
It was a long moment before she replied. “When I first heard your brother play that queer little bagatelle you both performed tonight, I sensed it,” she said softly.
“Sensed what?”
She turned her head away. “The thinning of the barrier between worlds.”
All the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
“At first, I thought it was your brother who had the gift,” she said, giving Josef a sidelong glance. “He certainly has a marvelous talent for music, but no, it was not his playing that parted the veil between us and the Underground. It was the notes.” She laughed, without humor, without mirth. “Those of us who have been touched by Der Erlkönig can reach across worlds, in sight or sound or sense. We can hear things, see things, feel things that no other mortals can witness. My gift is sensation, but yours, Elisabeth, is sound.”
The air around us grew heavy, stale, thick, as though we were trapped in a burrow. A barrow. A grave.
“Touched by Der Erlkönig,” I breathed. “What do you mean? Have you . . . have you met . . . him?”
The Count and Countess exchanged glances. “Not all of us,” he said, shaking his head. “Some of us merely wish to be graced with the gifts of the Underground.”
“You keep saying gifts,” I said. “What gifts?”
“Why, a connection with the unseen currents of the world,” he said, opening his hands and spreading them wide, palms turned up as in supplication. “They say the greatest artists, musicians, philosophers, inventors, and madmen were elf-touched.”
Elf-touched. Magda. Constanze. Me. Those broken, beautiful members of our family with one foot in the Underground and one in the world above. Straddling the here and there had turned them inside out.
“Madness is not a gift,” I said angrily.
“Nor is it a curse,” the Count returned gently. “Madness simply is.”
The Countess shook her head, but bestowed a small, tender smile upon her husband when she thought the rest of us didn’t see. I looked to my brother, but Josef kept his gaze averted. Instead he was staring at the Procházkas, his face a picture of hunger, want and desire honing the features of his face into an almost predatory sharpness.
“You say my gift is sound,” I said to the Countess. “But you fail to convince me that it is of any significance.”
“It is,” she said, “when you are the only one who can speak with Der Erlkönig himself. When your music creates a bridge between worlds.”
“A bridge between worlds? What does that mean?”
The Procházkas looked at each other again. A silent conversation passed between them, an argument held and resolved within the space of several heartbeats. Then the Count closed his eyes and nodded, before turning to me with a hard expression on his face that was at odds with his cheerful, friendly countenance.
“It means, Fräulein,” he said, “that you are the only one who can save us.”
“Save you from what?” I asked.
His face was grave. “The end of the world.”