Perhaps it was the reason Woferl pricked his finger on the night flower. The reason for his illnesses. The reason for his strange dreams, the faraway look in his eyes. Most of all, perhaps it was the reason for Hyacinth’s promise to fulfill my wish. The air around me felt too thin now. I shifted, dizzy from the truth.
Woferl was the young princeling of the Kingdom of Back.
And perhaps, perhaps, everything Hyacinth had done was in order to find a way to claim Woferl’s soul in the same way he had claimed the princess.
You can be remembered, if he is forgotten. So let me take him away, Fräulein.I heard the words whispered as clearly as if he were standing beside me.
Deep in a corner of my mind, Hyacinth blinked in the dark, stirred, and smiled.
As we left Lille for Amsterdam, then Rotterdam, then the Austrian Netherlands, strange things started to happen.
Snow fell during one of our concerts on a sunny afternoon. News came from London that an unusual plague had broken out in England’s countryside. At the same time, we began to hear reports of vicious attacks across France, of man-eating wolf dogs prowling the mountain paths near Périgord.
“Herr von Grimm said the Beast of Gévaudan has a tail as long as I am tall,” Woferl said, knees on his chair as we ate a supper of lentil soup and spaetzle. He stretched his arms out. “And twice the rows of teeth of any wolf.”
Mama scolded him to sit down properly, while Papa chuckled. “And what makes you believe everything Herr von Grimm has to say?” he asked.
Woferl brightened, hungry to coax more smiles out of our father. “Well, he said I knew more at my age than most kapellmeisters in Europe.” He glanced at me. “He said Nannerl had the finest execution on the harpsichord. Isn’t that all truth?”
I looked up at my brother’s praise. His eyes darted to me for an instant before flickering away. He was curious about my mood lately, my quiet spells and faraway expressions. This was his way of reaching out to me.
I gave him a careful, practiced expression of gratitude. “You are very kind, Woferl,” I said to him. “Thank you.”
Woferl’s joy dampened at my response. He knew it was the kind of polite answer I gave to the nobility we played for, whenever I wanted to leave a good impression. He stared at me, searching for the truth beneath my trained response, but I just looked away from him and back to my plate. Perhaps he thought I was still angry with him because of my music. And perhaps I was. But I could not look at him without remembering what had happened in the kingdom, and what Hyacinth might want with him.
Papa sensed none of this odd tension between us. He laughed genuinely. Few things pleased him more than a reminder of courts impressed by our performances, and Herr von Grimm had indeed said those words when we’d played for the Prince of Conti in Paris during an afternoon tea.
Mama paused to meet our father’s eye. “It might not be a bad plan to avoid the mountain paths,” she said meaningfully to him.
Papa waved a nonchalant hand as he stirred his soup. “Nothing more than tales exaggerated by panicked witnesses, no doubt. There have been no reports from around Paris.”
“Louis XV himself has put a bounty on any wolf corpse brought in to him,” Mama said. “If the king fears this beast, then perhaps we should as well.”
“Beast.” Papa said the word through a twisting mouth, his distaste for the imaginary souring his good mood. “There is no such thing as a beast.”
I ate quietly. The conversation swirled around me like the waters of a murky lake, and my family smeared into distortion. None of us had said another word about my music published as a birthday present for the Prince of Orange. It was possible that my father had already forgotten all about it, that he had been paid his coin and promptly tucked my music away in some dusty corner of his mind.
And yet, I could feel the weight of this betrayal hanging over the dinner table like a storm. Everyone knew. Sometimes I waited for my father’s punishment to come, for him to finally confront me one day about my compositions and toss them into the fire, like I’d always feared.
I would have preferred that over this silence, this dismissal of what I’d written.
The thought sent such a chill through my bones that I shivered in the warm room, trying to stop my lips from snarling into a grimace.
I knew very well who was killing the people of Périgord and Gévaudan. I’d seen his form in my dreams last night, prowling through tall grasses. It was not a wolf dog, but a faery creature with a splitting grin and yellow eyes, hungry for more flesh now that I had finally helped him get a taste.
What I did not know was what I now wished. A part of me needed to return to the Kingdom of Back, to set right what I had done wrong. The Queen of the Night had tried to warn me, yet I had not believed her. The king’s champion had called out for me to come back, and yet I had thought him an ogre and fled. The river guardian had tried to keep me out. And yet, I had helped a monster. I had to fix what I’d done.
But a part of me still yearned for my wish, feared that I had lost it forever. Could I be remembered, without Hyacinth’s help? Was I now doomed to be forgotten, if I did not continue along with Hyacinth’s demands?I want what is mine,I’d told him. I still did.
And a part of myself that frightened me—a whisper in the shadows, a figure waiting in the woods—wanted to see my brother walk into the air. He would turn lighter and lighter until you could barely make out his shape. And when you finally blinked, he would be gone.
Weeks later, we finally returned to Salzburg.
I leaned out of our carriage to admire the Getreidegasse as wepassed through it, even though Sebastian and Mama told me to sit properly. The touch of the air, the smells that came with late autumn, the old wrought-iron signs that hung over the storefronts—it was all still there, in exactly the same spots they’d been when we’d first left years ago. For a moment, I forgot all about Hyacinth and my music and let myself indulge in the returning familiarity of this place. My heart hung on a hook, raw with anticipation, as we drew close to the row where our flat would be.
Here was home. Here, also, might be a letter from Johann, written and addressed to me. I tried to conjure up his hopeful face in my mind, the way we’d talked and laughed in my old dream. What might he say in a letter? Was he still traveling through Europe, visiting universities? Did he have plans to come to Austria? It didn’t matter to me. All I knew was that, if his letters had arrived, I needed to get to them before my parents did.
Beside me, Woferl sensed my tenseness and turned his face up to study mine. In the light, I saw the first hints of his adolescent cheekbones. How quickly he had turned twelve. How swiftly I had turned sixteen. We did not have many years left together now. I looked nervously away from him and back to the street. The feel of his eyes on me seeped through my back.
