Wintersong(113)

“Fine then,” I said. “I would deprive him of his voice. Fetch me his violin.”

My goblin girls exchanged glances. It would be a useless command.

I made a noise of disgust. “All right. Leave me be, and I shall call him another way.”

Twig and Thistle gave each other another glance, then faded away.

I waited.

I waited for the Goblin King to finish, for the guilt to run dry. I waited for the violin to fall silent so I could make my reply.

I organized my papers and began work on the second movement of the Wedding Night Sonata, the adagio.

You are the monster I claim, mein Herr.

Through the large mirrors lining the retiring room, I watched the river ripple through Salzburg, letting the mood serve as my inspiration. I heard the delicate pizzicato plinks of a violin, droplets of ice melting into spring and summer. Beneath that, the murmuring susurration of a flowing brook. Arpeggios on the fortepiano. I made notes on the paper in front of me. The key had not yet resolved in my mind, but I thought it might be C minor.

I modulated the arpeggios up and down, not with any purpose, just to play with the sound until I heard something that struck me. Nothing, so I began to expand the arpeggios. Better. Some chromatic color. There was tension building there beneath the notes. I liked it. I recognized it. It was the unbearable weight of desire.

I left no room for the Goblin King to reply.

The first movement had been about anger and impotence. The theme thwarted, the melody reaching and never quite resolving its potential until the end. The second movement would be about loss, and about dreams just out of reach. The world above. My body. His body. The throb of desire beat beneath it all, marrying these two movements together.

I made notes to revise the allegro with these new thoughts.

Softer. Gentler. The slower tempo of the adagio lent itself to a more meditative, melancholy air, but I did not want complacence and resignation. No, I wanted the melody to unsettle and disturb him, even as it beguiled and tempted him. Rising notes, a pause, then resolution. Modulating higher. The same pattern, a pause, then resolution. I thought of the Goblin King’s hands, sliding over my skin. A laden pause, then a painful grip. Over and over again. Leaving his mark upon my person. I made my marks on the score.

I leaned into the notes, my body pushing and pulling with the music. I closed my eyes and imagined the Goblin King standing behind me, his hands resting about my shoulders. Sixteenth notes in a chromatic scale. Those same hands, fingers splayed, running down my throat to my collarbone, down my shoulders, down my décolletage. Falling notes, glissando, slower eighths. I let out a sigh.

There was an echo of that sigh in the room.

Let the Goblin King listen to me now. Let him hear my frustration and forgiveness.

As I played, as I composed, I waited. I waited for the soft touch of a hand against my hair, the whisper of a breath upon my neck. I waited for his shadow to fall across the keys, for teardrops to fall on my shoulder. I waited and waited and waited until the sun came up, until the darkness faded to show no trace that the Goblin King had ever been there.



It didn’t work. I had been so certain—so sure—that my music, the music he had so desperately wanted of me, would be enough to draw the Goblin King from his guilt. But as the minutes, the hours, the days passed, my husband kept his distance. He had not touched me, not spoken to me, not looked at me since our disastrous encounter after he brought me back from the world above.

I missed him.

I missed our conversations by the fire, when he had read aloud from the writings of Erasmus and Kepler and Copernicus, when I had set aside my self-consciousness and performed for him the works of occasional poetry I had learned. I missed our childish games of Truth or Forfeit, his hand tricks and jests. I missed working with him on our Wedding Night Sonata, but most of all I missed his smile, his mismatched eyes, and those long, elegant fingers of his that worked both music and magic.

Well, if the Goblin King would not come to me, then I would drag him out from hiding myself.

The second movement of the Wedding Night Sonata was nearly finished, and it had nothing of the Goblin King’s voice within it. I set down my quill.

“Thistle,” I said to the waiting air.

The goblin girl materialized before me.

“What do you want now, Goblin Queen?” she sneered.

“Where is Der Erlkönig?” I asked.

“In the chapel. As is his wont these days.”

“Lead me to him.”

Thistle raised an eyebrow, or she would have, had she had eyebrows at all. “You are braver than I reckoned, mortal, to interrupt His Majesty during his devotions.”

I shrugged. “I believe in God’s unending forgiveness.”