Wintersong(120)

Then I blinked and they were as they ever had been: pale, faded, and icy.

“You are the one who wanted a happy ending, my dear. So you tell me, how does the story end?”

Tears slipped from my face, and he wiped them away with his thumbs.

“The foolish young man lets the beautiful maiden go.”

“Yes.” His voice was clotted thick with unshed emotion. “He lets her go.”

I burst into sobs then, and the Goblin King gathered me close, rocking me in his arms as I cried. I cried for the breaking of the foolish young man’s heart. I cried for the happiness we might have had. I cried for the selfishness I could not overcome. I cried for him, for us, but most of all, for myself. I was going home.

“You must leave, Elisabeth,” he said softly.

I nodded my head, unable to speak.

“Choose to live, Elisabeth. There’s a fire within you; keep it alight. Feed that flame with music and seasons and chocolate torte and strawberries and your grandmother’s Gugelhopf. Let it grow with your love for your family. Let it be a beacon to set your heart by, so that you may remain true to yourself.” He stroked my cheek. “Do this, so that I may remember you like this: fierce and full of life.”

I nodded again.

“Are you ready?”

No. “Tomorrow,” I said.

He smiled, then kissed me. His lips were gentle, and in them I tasted a farewell.

I kissed him back. Time did not stop for anyone, least of all me, but in that moment of our kiss, I found a little pocket of eternity.





THE MYSTERY SONATAS

If I did not sleep, tomorrow would never come.

I left the Goblin King slumbering in my bed and ran away. Not to the retiring room, where our music waited upon the stand, but to the chapel. It was his sanctuary, his place of refuge, but on this last night before my freedom, I wanted a word with God.

Neither Thistle nor Twig were on hand to guide me, but by now, I had learned that the labyrinth of the Underground unraveled for the Goblin Queen, and the path from my bedroom to God’s house was straight and narrow.

I wondered who had built the chapel. High above me, illuminated stained glass windows depicted various scenes, not from the life of Christ or the acts of the Apostles, but of Der Erlkönig and his brides. On the right, a series of panels showed a golden-haired woman clothed in white and a dark horned figure. The seasons progressed along with the panels as the maiden in white grew pale and thin. The very last window showed the maiden dying in the horned figure’s arms as another woman in blue stood behind them.

The windows lining the left-hand side showed a young man in red, riding a white horse through a forest as little hobgoblins and grotesques cavorted at its feet. As the windows went on, the young man encountered a mysterious horned figure in the woods, a nimbus of darkness surrounding him instead of a halo of light. As the young man knelt at the figure’s feet, the dark gloriole enveloped them both, and in the following panel, a shadowy gray man rode away on a white horse, leaving the young man in red with a crown of antlers upon his head.

The answers had always been here. But I had never thought to look for them in the house of God.

I knelt before the altar beneath the crucifix. I was an indifferent believer at best, a possible heathen at worst, having believed in God the way a child believes without question that tomorrow will come. Neither prayer nor catechism were particularly valued in my house, but I bowed my head before the sanctuary.

I did not know how to ask for courage or resolution. I did not know how to ask to stay the march of time, just for a little while. I was not ready to face the world above. Not yet.

There were no mirrors to the outside world in the chapel, but I imagined the Goblin Grove in the predawn lined with dark, with the faintest blush of blue lightening the blackness. The hour when the kobolds and Hödekin come out to play, Constanze used to say. I imagined the colors of the sky lightening and changing, a change so slight and gradual it might not be happening at all. In the world above, that would be my life, each second of each day passing with so little fanfare that the thought of dying was nothing more than the thought of dawn just beneath the horizon.

I had never given much thought to growing old, and the woman I would be when I was my grandmother’s age. Would I be like my grandmother, wizened and crabbed? Or someone more like Mother, whose fine lines and faded hair were graceful touches of wisdom rather than age? I touched my fingers to my cheek, still smooth, still young. As I aged, those cheeks would sink, the skin losing its firmness, its shape.

Käthe would have been horrified at the thought, but the idea of growing old gave me comfort. To grow old was to have lived a full life. Not all of us were so privileged as to have a full life. And now that privilege would once again be mine.