“Where is this trinket from, Herr Colas?” Woferl piped up as we stepped inside, his eyes locked on where the porcelain edelweiss sculpture sat in the window display.
The old shopkeeper scratched the loose skin under his chin. “Vienna, I believe.” He leaned down to give us both a conspiratorial grin. In the light, one of his eyes flashed and I thought I caughta glint of blue. He wagged a finger not at the trinket, but at the windowpane, and I thought again of the strange boy shattering our window into a thousand pieces. “Who knows, though, really? Perhaps it’s not from our world at all.”
My skin prickled at his words. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but he had already left us alone to our wandering and returned muttering to his little desk in the shop’s corner.
The shop looked hazy, the light filtering in from the windows illuminating the dust in the air. Shelves of trinkets were everywhere, music boxes in painted porcelain and strange creatures frozen in yellowing ivory, their lips twisted into humanlike grins. The stale scent of age permeated the room. While Woferl wandered off to a corner decorated with wind chimes, my eyes shifted to a dark corner of the shop hidden behind shelves and boxes. A thin ribbon of light cut through the shadows there. A door.
“Herr Colas,” I called out politely. “Are there more trinkets in your back room?”
He didn’t answer. All I could hear was the faint sound of humming.
My attention returned to the door. The humming seemed familiar now, a voice so perfectly tuned that it pulled at my chest, inviting me closer. My feet started moving of their own accord. I knew I shouldn’t have been back there without Herr Colas’s permission, and a small part of me wanted to step away—but as I drew closer, my fear faded away into nothing until I found myself standing right in front of the door.
The humming voice came from within, beautiful and coaxing.
I pushed the door with slow, steady hands and stepped inside.
At first, I saw nothing. Darkness. The door edged open without a sound, and I felt a touch of cool air. It smelled different from theair outside, not of winter and spices or of stale antiques, but of something green and alive.
I stepped onto moss, the dampness of it soaking the bottom hem of my petticoat. A faint glow gathered at my feet, a quivering mist of faery lights, skittish in their movements. The darkness crept away as I continued forward, until I could see the ground clearly without bending over, and I realized for the first time that I was walking inside a tunnel—the walls dripped with moss and green ivy, baby ferns and tiny rivulets of water. Strange fruits hung from the ivy trails, wet and bright blue and as plump as bird eggs, their shapes like musical notes. Eating one was surely a quick invitation to be poisoned, but in that moment, I felt such a surge of want tingling on my tongue that I reached out, unable to stop myself, and plucked a single fruit free of its stem. My movement jerked the ivy forward and then quickly back. Drops of water rained down from the vines in a shower.
I popped the fruit into my mouth and bit down until its skin burst. Sugar and citrus and some otherworldly spice flooded my mouth. I closed my eyes, savoring the flavor of it.
I reached to take another and my fingers sank into the soft vegetation. One of them brushed past something familiar—a soft, velvet surface. I looked at where my hand had been.
A patch of edelweiss was growing against the wall, their velvet petals glistening with dew, and when I blinked, several more popped out from the wall’s moss to hang sideways, their buds drooping toward the floor.
It was impossible, truly, to see a flower of the mountains in a place like this. But nothing about this place seemed real at all.
A few notes of music caught my attention. I turned instinctively toward the sound, seeking it out. It came from farther down,where the tunnel ended in a circle of light, playing like a secret insulated from the rest of the world. My heart ached for it.Music from my notebook?I picked up my skirts and quickened my steps. Ahead of me, the tunnel began to widen, sloping higher until it opened abruptly into a circular cove.
The ceiling appeared to be formed from a lattice of leaves and fruit. Patches of silver moonlight filtered through to the ground, where edelweiss carpeted the floor in a white blanket. Moss and foliage enveloped every wall. And sitting there, in the center of this strange space, was the most beautiful clavier I’d ever seen, covered with baroque art and wrapped in lengths of ivy.
No one sat at the bench, even though the velvet cushion upon it had an indent as if someone had just left. When my eyes went up to the clavier’s music stand, I saw with a surge of joy that my notebook was sitting there, waiting for me.
“It’s here!” I called out into the tunnel, hoping that Woferl would hear me from the shop. I stared in wonder at the clavier. The keys had rounded tips that glowed under the light like polished gulden, and the entire instrument looked carved not from wood, but from marble. I ran my fingers across its surface, searching for the gaps where the body of the instrument should meet the legs, where the hinges of the lid should be screwed into the belly. But there were no gaps. The entire clavier was carved from a continuous slate of marble, as if it had always been molded in this form.
My hand drifted across the clavier, afraid to touch it and yet unable to bear not doing so. How could something so lovely be real? What would it sound like? I hesitated there for a moment, torn in two directions, before I finally pulled the bench forward so that I could sit. The legs scraped against the moss on the ground.
My notebook was already flipped open to a menuett in C, the latest piece my father had composed and the same one that Woferl and I had been playing when we first saw the edelweiss against the parchment. The very piece that Woferl had committed to memory from a single session. Even glancing at the written notes filled my mind with its music. I could distinctly hear the measures of the menuett as if I were practicing them during my lessons.
I lifted my fingers to the keys and touched their glowing surface. The keys were cold as ice. Instantly I drew my hands back, but the burn of it tingled like snow on my tongue, dangerous and enticing. I placed my fingers in position again, savoring the strange chill of the instrument. This time I tried a few notes. The sound hovered in the air, surrounding me, richer in tone than any clavier I’d ever played. My eyes closed. I realized I was humming now, trying instinctively to match that perfect melody around me. My heart fluttered with the thrill of the music.
A carefree laugh echoed from behind me. “You can have it back, Fräulein.”
I stopped playing and whirled around to see the speaker.
There, underneath the shadows and the dripping moss, emerged a figure. Immediately I recognized him as the boy from the music room, the same silhouette who had walked along the shore in my very first dream. Under this new light, his pale skin took on a hint of blue. His grin was quick and lighthearted, his expression as much like a human boy’s as it could be.
In that moment, I realized that perhaps that first dream was not a dream at all. Nor were the edelweiss growing against my notebook, or the sight of this boy in my music room. Perhaps even this moment was real. The world around me felt so sharp and alive that I couldn’t possibly think otherwise.
“You can have it back,” he repeated in his perfect voice. “I’m done with it.”
“Who are you? Where do you come from?” I whispered.
The boy walked over to the clavier and performed a little jump. He settled comfortably on top of the instrument, then peered down at me with his head propped thoughtfully against one hand. His fingernails clicked against the clavier’s marble surface.
“From somewhere far away,” he said, “and very near.”
