Wintersong(11)

His contempt was a dash of cold water, quenching the remnants of our shared youth.

“Liesl, can you come watch the vat?” Mother asked, wiping the sweat from her brow. “The brewers are to arrive at any moment.”

“I’ll do it, ma’am,” Hans offered.

“Thank you, my dear,” she said. She relinquished the stirring rod to Hans and walked out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, leaving us alone.

We did not speak.

“Elisabeth,” Hans began tentatively.

Twist, trim, tie. Twist, trim, tie.

“Liesl.”

My hands paused for the briefest moment, and then I resumed my work. “Yes, Hans?”

“I—” He cleared his throat. “I had hoped to catch you alone.”

That caught my attention. Our eyes met, and I found myself staring at him, bold-faced and direct. He was less handsome than I was wont to remember him, his chin less strong, his eyes closer set, his lips pinched and thin. But no one could deny that Hans was a good-looking man, least of all me.

“Me?” My voice was hoarse, but steady. “Why?”

His dark eyes studied my face, a wrinkle of uncertainty appearing between his brows. “I … I want to make things right between us, Lies—Elisabeth.”

“Are they not?”

“No.” Hans stared at the swirling vat in front of him before setting his stirring rod aside, stepping closer to me. “No, they’re not. I … I’ve missed you.”

Suddenly it was hard to breathe. Hans seemed too big, too close, too much.

“We were good friends once, weren’t we?” he asked.

“We were.”

I could not concentrate through the nearness of him. His lips formed words, but I did not hear them, only felt the brush of his breath against my own lips. I held myself rigid, wanting to push into him, knowing I should pull away.

Hans grabbed my wrist. “Liesl.”

Startled, I stared at where his fingers were wrapped around my arm. For so long, I had wanted to touch him, to take his hands and feel those fingers entwined with my own. Yet the moment Hans touched me of his own accord seemed unreal to me. It was as though I were looking at someone else’s hand and someone else’s wrist.

He was not mine. He could not be mine.

Could he?

“Katharina is gone.”

Constanze had wandered into the kitchen. Hans and I leaped apart, but my grandmother did not notice the flush in my cheeks. “Katharina is gone,” she said again.

“Gone?” I struggled to gather my fallen composure and cover my exposed longing. “What do you mean? Gone where?”

“Just gone.” She sucked at a loose tooth.

“I sent Josef to fetch her.”

She shrugged. “She’s not anywhere in the inn, and your red cloak is missing.”

“I’ll go look for her,” Hans offered.

“No, I will,” I said hurriedly. I needed to put my mind and body back into their proper spaces. I needed to get away from him and find myself in the woods.

My grandmother’s dark eyes bored into me. “How did you choose, girlie?” she asked softly. She was hunched over her gnarled cane like a bird of prey, her black shawl draped over her shoulders like crow’s wings.

The memory of the goblin fruit’s bloody flesh running down my sister’s face and fingers returned to me. Josef is not the only who needs looking after. I felt sick.

“Hurry,” Constanze urged. “I fear she is for the Goblin King now.”

I ran out of the kitchen and into the great hall, wiping my hands on my apron. I took a shawl from the rack, wrapped it about my shoulders, and went in search of my sister.



I did not venture far into the woods, thinking Käthe would keep close to home. Unlike Josef or me, she had never felt any particular kinship with the trees and stones and babbling brooks in the forest. She did not like mud, or dirt, or damp, and preferred to stay inside, where it was warm, where she might primp and be pampered.

Yet my sister was in none of her usual haunts. Ordinarily, the farthest she ventured was to the stables (we owned no horses, but the guests occasionally traveled on horseback), and sometimes to the woodshed, where the tame grasses surrounding our inn ended and the wild edges of the forest began.

There was the faint, impossible scent of summer peaches ripening on the breeze.

Constanze’s warning echoed in my mind. She is for the Goblin King now. I wrapped my shawl tighter about me and hurried off the footpath into the woods.

Past the woodshed, past the creek that ran behind our inn, deep in the wild heart of the forest, was a circle of alder trees we called the Goblin Grove. The trees grew in such a way as to suggest twisted arms and monstrous limbs frozen in an eternal dance, and Constanze liked to tell us that the trees had once been humans—naughty young women—who displeased Der Erlkönig. As children we had played here, Josef and me, played and sang and danced, offering our music to the Lord of Mischief. The Goblin King was the silhouette around which my music was composed, and the Goblin Grove was the place my shadows came to life.