THE RETURN OF THE GOBLIN QUEEN
sanity was a prison and now I am free, free to be shapeless, free to be formless, free to be nonsense. I wake up with gold in my mouth, fairy lights strung between my teeth like candy floss. I giggle as they light up my insides and dance, wiggling through my body like fireflies through a summer night. I am a summer night. I am heat and humidity and languidity, and I lounge upon my throne like a cat, like a queen, like Cleopatra. My throne is a bed, my receiving chamber a barrow, but I twist the reality in my mind, giving me a room full of wonders and splendors. Furniture of porcelain and glass, a hearth draped in silk and wood, tapestries woven of root and rock. My lashes are moth wings, my crown wrought of crystal and serpent scales. My royal robes are spun of spider webs and darkness, my maquillage the blood of my enemies.
“Mistress?”
I snap to attention, my body alive with the sound of a familiar voice, tickling all the memory parts of me with a feather touch. Two goblin girls sway and tilt before me, one with thistledown for hair, the other with branches upon her head.
“Twig! Thistle!” I cry with delight.
Their faces are strange to me, for suddenly I can read the words of their emotions upon their eyes and lips. They are worried and they are frightened, and I marvel at the humanness of their expressions, and the goblinness of my thoughts.
“Have you come to bring me to the party? You should throw me a ball if there is none. Invite the changelings, invite the old laws, invite the world!”
The last time I came, there was a ball in my honor, where I had danced with the Goblin King and my sister. A goblin ball, a fairy ball, a ball of too much wine and indulgence, tasting of blackberry tongues and sin.
“Der Erlkönig is waiting for you,” says Thistle, and I hear the twinning of her voice with another. My grandmother’s snappish tone harmonizes with the goblin girl’s words, saying things she would rather not have me hear. I care about you. I am frightened for you.
“Of course, Constanze,” I reply, and float to my feet with a smile. “Take me to him!”
The other goblin girl wrings her hands, dripping her nervousness like puddles onto the floor. “He is . . . changed, Your Highness.”
Changed. The man into a monster, the boy to a changeling, the composer to a madwoman. We are butterflies and the Underground is our chrysalis, a place of transformations and magic and miracles.
“I know,” I say. “He is corrupted. A corrupt king for a corrupt queen.”
My goblin girls exchange looks. “You are not safe,” says Thistle. Contempt laces her voice but tastes cold like fear, with the unexpectedly bitter burn of concern lingering on the tongue.
“I know,” I say again. My smile grows wider, my eyes madder. “I know.”
“It is not Der Erlkönig you should fear,” Twig whispers, “but the reckoning he is owed.”
I open my arms wide, my robes of spider-silk and black lace billowing in an unseen wind. I am a top out of control, toppling and wobbling back and forth, back and forth, and the exhilaration and uncertainty excites me, for I do not know where I will go or what I will say.
“I am the Goblin Queen,” I giggle. “I can pay whatever is asked of me.” The words bubble from my lips and pop with little bursts of arrogance before me. I laugh again, feeling the tickle on my tongue.
“Even if it is the changeling boy?” Thistle asks.
My arms fall to my sides, and I fall over, the center thrown from me. Josef. How bothersome that I could not shed my love for him as easily as I gave up my reason. My heart cracks, and the pieces belonging to my brother glow and pulse through the cage of bones. I am a skeleton draped in cobwebs with a candle flame at its core. My sanity was my prison and my armor and without it, the flame flickers this way and that, buffeted by forces beyond my control. I lift my hands to cover my naked heart, but it is not enough to shield it.
“My brother has nothing to do with this,” I say.
“Oh but he has everything to do with this,” Thistle returns. “After all, is he not the reason you came back?”
“Yes, but I won’t give him back!” Petulance forces my lips into a pout. “He’s mine!”
Twig and Thistle’s eyes slide back and forth, from my face to each other. Selfish, selfish, selfish, they seem to say. I want to snatch those beetling eyes and wear them like rings about my fingers, to shut up their unvoiced censure.
“Stop looking at me,” I snap. “Stop judging me.”
My goblin girls look at each other again. “As you wish, Your Highness,” they say. “As you wish.”
* * *
I demanded a ball, but the gathering of goblins and changelings in the enormous, glittering cavern do not look as though they are enjoying themselves. There is no music, no dancing, no feasting, no flirting. I cast my gaze thither and hither, both disturbed and delighted by the transparency of feelings upon their features. When last I visited the Underground, it was as though I visited a foreign land, the language just familiar enough to be intelligible. But now the world is not just intelligible, it is comprehensible. Comprehended. Commendable.
“I am one of you!” I clap my hands with delight, pinching the cheek of a leather-faced imp wearing a mask of trepidation. “I see you! I hear you! I understand you!”
I survey the room from the top of the carved stone stairs at the entrance to the cavern. Where once I would have seen a sea of identical faces staring back at me, I now saw individuals as clear and distinct as leaves on a tree. How have I not noticed pattern and repetition and shape of them? The veins that define them, the unique marks and branches that form them?
As I descend the steps, the crowd parts before me like the Red Sea before Moses, opening up a path straight from my feet to the figure at the other end of the cavern, sitting on a throne of antlers upon a marble dais. He lounges upon that enormous chair, inky swirls of black staining his skin, a pair of ram’s horns jutting from his brow. His eyes are pale, the blue-white of blizzards and icy death.
Der Erlkönig.
A host of ghostly warriors flank him on either side of the throne, wights and geists and spectral horsemen, dressed in rotting scraps of flesh and fabric, holding spears and shields rusted with age and disuse. The Wild Hunt.
“Mein Herr!” The smile starts at my toes and wriggles up my body, wrapping about my lower belly, my chest, my throat, my face. The cavern rings with my voice, and all those assembled cringe from the force of it.
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 and 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.