I spied a scarlet shape in the woods ahead of me. Käthe in my cloak, walking to my sacred space. An irrational, petty slash of irritation cut through my dread and unease. The Goblin Grove was my haunt, my refuge, my sanctuary. Why must she take everything that was mine? My sister had a gift for turning the extraordinary into the ordinary. Unlike my brother and me—who lived in the ether of magic and music—Käthe lived in the world of the real, the tangible, the mundane. Unlike us, she never had faith.
Mist curled in about the edges of my vision, blurring the distance between spaces, making near seem far and far seem near. The Goblin Grove was but a few minutes’ walk from our inn, but time seemed to be playing tricks on me, and it felt as though I had been walking both forever and not at all.
Then I remembered time—like memory—was just another one of the Goblin King’s playthings, a toy he could bend and stretch at will.
“Käthe!” I called. But my sister did not hear me.
As a child, I’d pretended to see him, Der Erlkönig, this mysterious ruler underground. No one knew what he looked like, and no one knew what his true nature was, but I did. He looked like a boy, a youth, a man, whatever I needed him to be. He was playful, serious, interesting, confusing, but he was my friend, always my friend. It was make-believe, true, but even make-believe was a sort of belief.
But those were the imaginings of a little girl, Constanze told me. The Goblin King was none of the things I knew him to be. He was the Lord of Mischief—mercurial, melancholy, seductive, beautiful—but he was, above all, dangerous.
Dangerous? little Liesl had asked. Dangerous how?
Dangerous as a winter wind, which freezes the marrow from within, and not like a blade, which slashes the throat from without.
But I was not to worry, for only beautiful women were vulnerable to the Goblin King’s charms. They were his weakness, and he was theirs; they wanted him—sinuous and fey and untamable—the way they wanted to hold on to candle flame or mist. Because I was not beautiful, I never felt the weight of Constanze’s warnings about the Goblin King. Because Käthe was not imaginative, she never had either.
And now I feared for us both.
“Käthe!” I called again.
I picked up my skirts and my pace, running after my sister. But no matter how quickly I ran, the distance between us never closed. Käthe continued walking in her slow, steady way, yet I never managed to overtake her. She was as far from me as when I had first set out after her.
My sister stepped into the Goblin Grove and paused. She glanced over her shoulder, straight at me, but she never saw me. Her eyes scanned the woods, searching for something—or someone—specific.
Suddenly she wasn’t alone. There in the Goblin Grove, standing by my sister’s side as though he had always been there, was the tall, elegant stranger from the marketplace. He wore his cloak and hood, which hid his face from me, but Käthe gazed up at him with a look of adoration.
I stopped in my tracks. Käthe had a strange little smile on her face, a smile I had never seen before, the thin, weak smile of an invalid facing a new day. Her lips looked bitten, and her skin was wan and pale. I felt bizarrely betrayed, by Käthe or the tall, elegant stranger, I wasn’t sure. I did not know him, but he had seemed to know me. He was just another thing Käthe had taken from me, another thing she had stolen. Wasn’t he?
I was about to march straight into the Goblin Grove and drag my sister back home to safety when the stranger drew back his hood.
I gasped.
I could say the stranger was beautiful, but to describe him thus was to call Mozart “just a musician.” His beauty was that of an ice storm, lovely and deadly. He was not handsome, not the way Hans was handsome; the stranger’s features were too long, too pointed, too alien. There was a prettiness about him that was almost girly, and an ugliness about him that was just as compelling. I understood then what Constanze had meant when those doomed young ladies longed to hold on to him the way they yearned to grasp candle flame or mist. His beauty hurt, but it was the pain that made it beautiful. Yet it was not his strange and cruel beauty that moved me, it was the fact that I knew that face, that hair, that look. He was as familiar to me as the sound of my own music.
This was the Goblin King.
I came upon that realization with no more surprise than if I had come across the local baker. The Goblin King had always been my neighbor, a fixture in my life, as sure as the church steeple and the cloth merchant and the poverty that dogged my family’s heels. I had grown up with him outside my window, just as I had grown up with Hans and the milkmaid and the purse-lipped ladies of the village square. Of course I recognized him. Had I not seen his face every night in my dreams, in my childish fancies? Yet … hadn’t it all been just that—pretend?