THE LABYRINTH
i was not alone.
A handful of guests were also gathered outside, clustered in dribs and drabs around torches planted in intervals about the gardens. A few gentlemen were smoking pipes while their female companions fanned at the blue haze gathering about their faces, huddled close for warmth. Although the days in Vienna had grown almost warm, the nights still nipped at any bits of uncovered flesh like spiteful icy sprites. The cold air felt good against my flushed cheeks, but I wished I had brought my cloak.
Low laughter and soft murmurs rose in conversation as I descended from the terrace to the gardens, a persistent yet inescapable buzz that followed me like a swarm of flies. I resisted the urge to swat at the words catching at my ears.
“Have you heard about poor old Karl Rothbart?” I overheard one of the women say.
“No!” one of the men exclaimed. “Do tell.”
“Dead,” the woman replied. “Found in his workshop, lips blue with cold . . .”
Their voices faded away as I pressed myself farther and farther into the garden’s murky retreat, searching for the entrance to the hedge maze. For all that I could not bear my own silence, I wanted the voices of the world around me to disappear. Solitude was different from loneliness, and it was solitude I was seeking.
At last I came upon the hedge maze. Far from the warm circles of light cast by torch and lamp, the leaves and twigs here were edged in a silver lacework of starlight and shadow. The entrance was framed by two large trees, their branches still bare of any new growth. In the darkness, they seemed less like garden posts marking the way into the labyrinth than two silent sentinels guarding the doorway to the underworld. Shapes writhed in the shadows beyond the archway of bramble and vine, both inviting and intimidating.
Yet I was not frightened. The hedge maze smelled like the forest outside the inn, a deep green scent of growth and decay, where life and death were intermingled. A familiar scent. A welcoming scent. The scent of home. Removing my mask, I crossed the threshold, letting darkness swallow me whole.
There were no torches or candles lit upon the paths, and neither moonlight nor starlight penetrated the dense bramble. Yet my footing along these paths was sure, every part of me attuned to the wildness around me. Unlike the maze at Schönbrunn Palace, a meticulously manicured and man-made construction, this labyrinth breathed. Nature creeped in along the edges, reclaiming groomed, orderly, and civilized corridors into a twisting tangle of tunnels and tracks, weeds and wildflowers. Paths grew vague, roots unruly, branches untamed. Somewhere deep in the labyrinth, I could hear the giggles and gasps of illicit encounters in the shrubbery. I was careful of my step, lest I trip over a pair of trysting lovers, but when I came upon no one else, I let myself fall into a meditative state of mind. I wandered the recursive spirals of the hedge maze, turn after turn after turn, feeling a measure of calm for the first time in a long time.
Somewhere at the heart of the labyrinth, a violin began to play.
It was as though some part of me that had been asleep was waking up after a deep slumber. Every part of me opened and unfurled toward the sound, my eyes clear, my ears alert. The thin, high wail of the instrument’s voice seemed distant, yet each note was as clear as a dewdrop, the sound surrounding me from every direction: from north, south, east, west, up, down, behind.
“Josef?” I called.
I had not seen my brother since he vanished into the crowd earlier that night; he had not been on the dance floor, nor in any of the other rooms I had seen in my efforts to find a way out. I imagined he felt as out of depth as I had and had run to the first place that had felt comfortable, safe. The hedge maze possessed a waiting quality that reminded me of the Goblin Grove, an in-betweenness that reminded me of the long-forgotten sacred spaces of the world.
A swift breeze rustled the twigs and branches around me, raising the hairs at the back of my neck. The night grew even colder, and I wrapped my arms about me for warmth. There was a strange, metallic smell like the air before a thunderstorm, although the wind that knifed through my flimsy gown was keen-edged and bitter. Dead leaves skittered about me like rats through walls, and the darkness deepened as clouds raced across the face of the moon.
I reminded myself that I was not alone in the labyrinth, that somewhere beyond these bushes was a pair of lovers enjoying the salt-sweat of each other’s company.
As I continued on, the voice of the violin changed. It grew deeper, weightier, the sound rich with emotion and resonant with feeling. This was not my brother’s playing. The lightness, the transcendence, the ethereality that characterized his performance was missing. It was another musician.
And then I recognized the piece.
The Wedding Night Sonata.
My teeth chattered and I began to shiver uncontrollably. Fear and frost froze my blood. How could this be? I had never properly shared this piece of music with my brother; the letters containing drafts I had sent him had vanished, unread, into the Count’s clutches. To my knowledge, he had never even heard the piece, for although his ear and his memory were good, not even Josef could recall in perfect detail every note, every pause, every phrase. There was only one other person who knew the Wedding Night Sonata.
“M-mein Herr?”
It could not be. It shouldn’t be. There was no crossing the veil, no breaking the barrier between worlds. What could this possibly mean? The skittering around me escalated into a frenzy of scratching. It no longer sounded like leaves skipping across still-frozen ground, but fingernails—claws—scraping over stone.
Mistress.
I startled and glanced over my shoulder. I could make out no familiar shapes in the darkness of the hedge maze corridors. No human shapes. Branches and brambles reached for me with grasping hands as I passed, bursting forth from the walls like sudden shoots and saplings. Stone urns and marble benches warped and shifted into leering gargoyles, and I tried not to look at them, tried not to imagine beetle-black eyes and cobweb hair.
Your Highness.
It was but the whispering wind. The same wind that brought with it an unseasonably wintry chill, the scent of ice, of pine, of deep waters, and underground caverns. It was a memory, a ghost, my longing made manifest, not my mind gone awry. But as the underbrush shivered and danced, it unfolded itself into the shape of a girl.
“No,” I said hoarsely.
A face grew from the ragged leaves, a long nose, pointy chin, narrow cheeks. It was a familiar face, a face I had thought I would never see again.
“Twig?” I breathed.
The goblin girl nodded, dipping her branch-and-cobweb-laden head at me in acknowledgment. In respect. Spots of granite dotted her green-brown arms like bruises, patches of stone crawling up the side of her face like a disease. She scratched at the patches as though they pained her, and she looked as though she were in agony. The only time I had ever seen Twig turn into stone was when she had violated one of the old laws to tell me what had happened to the first Goblin Queen. My heart twinged with pity—pity and fear and longing—and I reached for her, hands trembling.
My goblin girl held out her hands to me in turn, but our fingers passed through the other’s like smoke. Her lips moved but no sound emerged but the sighing of the mistral breeze.
“Twig?” I rasped. “Twig? What is it?”
She opened her mouth to speak, then choked, the patches of stone on her skin seeming to writhe and grow.
“Twig!”
The covenant is undone. There was terror in her depthless black eyes, the first human emotion I had ever seen on a goblin’s face. It is corrupting us. Corrupting him.
Him. The Goblin King. My austere young man.
“Twig!” I grabbed her hand, but got nothing but a fistful of thorns. “Twig!”
Save us. Twig cried out in silent anguish, her body cracking, popping, snapping in unnatural ways as she resisted crumpling back into bush and brush. Save him.
“How?” I cried over the screaming wind. “Tell me!”
My goblin girl’s eyes rolled back in her head as vines burst from the ground, crisscrossing her body like chains around a prisoner. With tremendous effort, she lifted a hand and pointed a many-jointed finger at my feet.
The . . . poppies . . .
Looking down, I saw that I was standing in a river of red, a trail of blood leading away from me like a guided path of scarlet petals.
“Twig?”
Nothing remained but stars, winking at me through bramble branches. I thought I could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance, a gale howling just beyond the edges of the hedge maze. Hoofbeats and the baying of hounds in a hunt. The Wild Hunt.
The old laws made flesh: given steel and teeth and hounds to reap what they are owed.
Heart hammering, I raced along the path of poppies, trying to outrun and outpace the clang and the bang of alarm bells ringing in my mind. Behind me, I thought I could hear heavy breathing, the thudding footfalls of a pursuer. Turn after turn after turn, until I lost sight of the flowers and understood too late that I had become lost in the labyrinth.
And still the violin played on.
I pressed a hand to my breast, trying to catch my breath. A name came to my lips—Josef? Käthe? François?—but who would find me here, alone and anonymous? I thought of the Goblin King, and the burn in my chest intensified to a soul-deep ache.
The bushes rustled behind me. I turned to look, and gasped.
Looming in the shadows was a figure, skin night-black and eyes moon pale. Fingers broken and gnarled like desiccated vines curled around the neck of a violin, the resin cracked and peeled with age. A crown of horns grew from a nest of cobwebs and thistledown, but the face that stared back at me was human. Familiar.
Him.
“M-mein Herr?”
No sound from his lips, no movement of his head. The face that stared back was dear to me for all that it had changed, but it was like gazing into the eyes of a stranger. The mismatched irises had faded entirely to a blue-white that glowed in the dark, and there was no hint of recognition in their depths.
“Mein Herr?” I said again.
But no glimmer or spark of love warmed those icy eyes. I did not know if I could bear the weight of my shattered heart.
“Oh, mein Herr,” I said, voice catching. “What have they done to you? What have I done?”
Slowly, carefully, so as not to startle a frightened forest creature, I lifted my hand, fingers outstretched. I reached for his cheek, to press my palm against his skin, to feel his flesh beneath my touch. The Goblin King held himself still as I drew just a bit closer, a bit closer, our eyes locked as I pushed and tested the new edges between us. His pupils grew dilated, and the pale ring of color around them deepened to a gray-blue, a muted green.
“Elisabeth?”
His head snapped up at the sound of someone calling my name.
“Elisabeth!”
“No,” I whispered. “No, please, be, thou, with me—”
But he was gone in the next blink. The face I had been so close to caressing was the wind-smoothed wood of a cherry tree, the crown of horns its branches, his eyes a pair of stars in the night sky, winking at me in cruel jest. A wave of resignation and despair nearly overwhelmed me to my knees. Of course this had all been nothing but a bad dream. Nothing but my longing and loneliness giving life to the shadows in my mind.
“Elisabeth? Ah, there you are!” said an unfamiliar, faintly accented voice.
Glancing over my shoulder, I nearly fainted when I saw a skull hovering beside me, its teeth bared in a ghoulish grin.
“My dear? Are you all right?” The skull tilted back, and it was in that moment I realized I had not been staring at a disembodied skeleton, but a plump little man draped in a black cloak with a death’s-head mask perched atop his face. An incredibly realistic and detailed death’s-head mask.
“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered. “Who are you?”
“I am Der Tod,” the stranger chuckled. “I thought the costume was obvious.” He beckoned toward me with the tip of his toy scythe. “And you, my dear, are my lost little angel of music. We have been looking for you for over an hour.”
I held myself close, not wanting to make any sudden movements lest I spook this odd little man into doing something unpredictable. “We?” I asked. “Who’s been looking for me?”
“My wife and me, of course,” he said blithely, as though it were the most obvious answer in the world. “We’ve been waiting for you a long time. Now, my dear, let us make our way back to the party.”
I had no response to such a cryptic statement. When I made no move to follow the stranger in the death’s-head mask, he tilted his head in a quizzical expression.
“Fräulein? Are you coming?”
“You must forgive me,” I said stiffly. “I don’t know who you are, Master Death.”
“Hmmm? Oh!” He laughed then, lifting his mask to reveal a surprisingly cheerful, apple-cheeked face. “I do beg your pardon.” He swept forward in an elegant bow. “I am Otto von Procházka und zu Snovin, at your service.” He straightened and fitted his death’s-head mask over his face again, becoming anonymous once more. “The host of this infamous soiree, the proprietor of this magnificent house, and if I’m not mistaken”—dark eyes twinkled at me from the depths of the skull—“your most excellent new benefactor.”