Somewhere through the dullness crowding my mind came the sharp stab of panic. “I am not a faery,” I replied, but my tongue felt slow, dragging against the floor of my mouth.
You are the one who poisons the land.
“I am...” The words scraped against my lips.
You are not meant to be in the kingdom.
With all my strength, I dragged my thoughts out of me and shouted them into the wind’s tide. Words that I suddenly wished I could shout before an audience instead of hiding in my quiet curtsy. “I am a composer named Nannerl!”
All of a sudden, the wind gave way—disappearing as abruptly as it had come. I stumbled forward and fell into the grass. As I pulled myself up, I noticed the grass had gone still again, and before me loomed the circle of rock pillars. The whispers were gone, the air lighter.
I clutched the golden crossbow tightly to my chest, lest it vanish, and ran the final few steps past the pillars. A great gasp burst from my lips as I passed the rocks. I could breathe properly again; my limbs no longer felt crushed under an invisible weight. I turned in the direction of Hyacinth and hurried to him.
He’d grown tall enough that I had to tilt my face up to him. “You have done it, Fräulein!” he said, wonder in his voice. Then he placed his cool hands against my face and kissed me.
I froze, caught like a butterfly in his hands. His lips seemeddusted with sugar, sweet and ice-cold, cleansing away the last of the sacred valley’s pull.This is what it’s like to kiss a boy,I thought through the shiver that washed over me.
Johann flashed unbidden through my mind. His raised brows, his quick smile, the way he’d made my heart dance in my chest. But where heat bloomed on my cheeks for him, Hyacinth’s touch brought winter with it, the glitter of fresh snow, the feathers of frost that lined a frozen river’s surface.
When he finally pulled away, I swayed in place, unable to speak for a moment. My fingers came up to brush against my lips. They tingled, cold to the touch.
“Why,” I whispered at last, “did the valley speak to me?”
His smile wavered. “What did it say?”
I repeated for him what I’d heard.You are the one who poisons the land. You are not meant to be in the kingdom.
He shivered at the words, turning his face away from me as if in great pain. The glow of his eyes reflected blue soft against his cheeks. Around him, faeries came to comfort him and caress his face. “This place yearns to keep us out,” he murmured, casting a glance toward the arching bridge. “Come, Nannerl, let us leave this behind.” And before I could ask him anything more about it, he took my hand and began to lead me back the way we’d come.
THECHÂTEAU
In the morning, Hyacinth was nowhere to be seen.
The light beaming into our room had no quaver of the unusual. But the dream of the kingdom seemed startlingly real today. Perhaps it was the memory of Hyacinth’s cool hands against my face, pulling me in toward him. The ice of his kiss lingered, so that when I brought a finger up to run along my lips, my skin still felt cool to the touch.
I lay there for a moment, unmoving, trying to remember all the details. Something in my heart felt strangely light and empty. What would happen now? What would Hyacinth do next?
A sudden impulse gripped me and I looked to where Woferl lay at my side. He slept soundly, his small body curled into a ball underneath the blankets. A soft murmur came from his lips. I watched him, noting the flush of his cheeks. When I reached out to touch his forehead, his skin was burning with heat.
For two weeks, a fever wracked Woferl’s body. Every evening, he tossed and turned, his brow beaded with sweat, murmuring deliriously until he’d finally fall into a troubled sleep.
Mama blamed the sickness on the fact that Papa had worked us so relentlessly for the past few weeks. Papa blamed it on the cold and the wet air. I sat at Woferl’s bedside and watched him quietly. My thoughts dwelled on how my brother had looked when stricken with scarlet fever, how I’d told him the story of the castle and then imagined the shadows floating around his chamber.
The tasks I’d completed for Hyacinth stayed with me. I thought through each one as I watched my brother grimace in his sleep, dark circles bruising the skin under his eyes. Surely it was all a coincidence, the way Woferl’s illnesses seemed to line up with these vivid dreams I had.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that his illnesses were linked to the kingdom and to my tasks there. It felt as if my brother’s fate and the princeling’s and mine were all tethered together as tightly as a violin string. Woferl’s hot hand pressed against mine. I held on to him and stared at his pitiful figure, his eyes dancing under their lids. His lips moved silently. Now and then, they seemed to form Hyacinth’s name, as if his essence was hanging somewhere in the air. But I heard nothing.
Was my brother dreaming of the princeling? Was Hyacinth visiting with him secretly?
A spark of envy burned in my heart, followed immediately by guilt.
If I were the one lying sick here, I knew my brother wouldn’t hesitate to stay by my side every evening, humming to me little tunes that he’d written, kissing my cheeks, and asking me to grow stronger. He wouldn’t sit in silence and allow jealousy to invade his mind. The realization made me tighten my grip on his hand.
Would it change what I did for Hyacinth, if I knew that the link between all our fates were real? I lowered my eyes, ashamed that I didn’t know the answer right away. He was so small for his age, his body so vulnerable. I thought of all the times he would curl close to me for protection, and my heart softened in affection. I lowered my face to his and whispered for him to get well.
Night after night, I returned to hold Woferl’s hand and watch the shadows dance across his face. I stayed until, slowly, slowly, he began to pull out of the darkness. The fog disappeared from his eyes. He began to look alert again. He would wake up in the morning and ask for parchment and ink.
The arguments between my mother and father stopped. My worries about the kingdom’s effect on Woferl’s health faded away again. And all of us breathed a collective sigh of relief.
