Wintersong(105)

The changeling had his hands cupped around an object, offering it to me as though it were a precious thing, a baby bird.

“Another?”

He nodded. His palms opened like a flower, and at their heart, there lay a bloody mass. I gasped.

The changeling tilted his head, his flat, black eyes watching me with no expression. Then I realized that it wasn’t a dying creature in his hands; it was a bunch of strawberries, bruised, battered, and bleeding.

“Oh,” I said, a bit breathless. “Thank you.”

“They’re not from me,” he said. “They’re from the sunshine girl.”

Käthe. The sunshine girl. The first smile in an age touched my lips, and my spirits, dead and dull, stirred within me.

“An offering in the grove?”

The changeling nodded again. “I saw her from the shadows. She spoke your name and wished you happy birthday.”

Birthday? I had forgotten. I had long ceased to mark the passing of days, weeks, hours. The Underground never changed, never transformed with the seasons, and the years stretched out ahead of me, bland and blank. “Is it midsummer?”

“Yes. Everything is warm and lush and green.” The changeling’s voice was as flat as his expressionless eyes, yet I thought I could hear a note of longing in it. His longing echoed in me.

It would be my twentieth summer, in the world above.

“I wish I could see it.” A useless wish. I had the power to bend the will of the goblins to my desire, but this was not one they could fulfill.

The changeling said nothing, but pushed his hands forward, berries still red in his palms.

When we went strawberry picking, Käthe and I used to argue over which were the best berries to gather. She always went for the biggest, whereas I always picked the reddest. She used to say that it was best to have the biggest, because you got the most strawberry for the littlest effort. I would retort that bigger wasn’t always better; the reddest berries, the ones most vibrant and even in color, were always the sweetest.

The berries in the changeling’s hands were small, but each was perfect in its red intensity. They shone like jewels in the dark, and I wished I could want them. That I could crave them the way I once had. But the taste of strawberries, of chocolate, of tart mustard on yeasty bread—they were all gone.

I plucked a berry from the changeling’s hands anyway.

“Thank you,” I said, and took a bite.

Sweetness burst across the tongue. More than sweet; I tasted sunshine in the meadow, lemony greenness, heat. Memories flooded in along with the taste, running down my throat like tears.

I tasted Käthe’s love.

“Oh,” I breathed. “Oh!”

I devoured the rest, shoving them all into my mouth like a child, as many as I could hold. I should have waited, I should have savored, but I didn’t care. Color returned to my world, and I felt my veins run with red.

The changeling was silent as I ate. It wasn’t until I had finished that I caught the look of envy on his face. It was the first truly human expression I had ever seen in a changeling and it startled me.

“I’m sorry.” I wiped the juice from my lips. “I didn’t think to offer you any.”

He shrugged. “It would turn to ashes in my mouth anyway.”

Sympathy flared through me. We weren’t so different, the changeling and I. Neither dead nor truly alive. Along with my sense of taste, all my emotions returned to me with full force. My throat closed with the pity and sorrow I felt for this strange creature. I covered his hands with mine.

Hunger swept over his features, and too late I remembered Thistle’s warning. Careful, they bite.

But the changeling did not move. Instead, he closed his eyes, and pain thumped my chest. He reminded me so much of Josef, his gentle fragility, his ethereal otherworldliness. This changeling lived a half-life, and suddenly I was glad my brother was far from me, far from the fate from which my love had saved him.

Stay away, Sepperl, I thought fiercely. Stay away, and never come back.

“They say love can free you,” the changeling whispered. “That if one, just one person loved you enough, it could bring you back to the world above.” He opened his eyes, those flat, inhuman goblin eyes, and implored me. “Would you love me?”

His words, those little gifts. It was all made clear to me now why this changeling had sought me out. An invisible hand crumpled my heart in my chest. I wanted to gather him in my arms, to soothe him the way I would have soothed my little brother, kissing away the pain from his fingertips after Papa had made him practice his scales so much it tore the calluses. But he was not my brother.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as gently as I could.