“Hmm?”
“Tell me a story,” I repeated.
“What sort of story?”
“A bedtime story. And let it have a happy ending.”
I felt the chuckle roll through him. “Is there one in particular you wish to hear?”
I paused. “Do you know,” I said in a small voice, “the true tale of the brave maiden?”
It was a long time before he answered. “Yes,” he said. “I know the true tale of the brave maiden. But I only know of it as a fairy tale, the story pieced together from bits of memory, both learned and inherited.”
“The story is not yours?”
A beat. “No.”
“Does the story not belong to Der Erlkönig?”
“The story belongs to Der Erlkönig,” the Goblin King replied, “but not to me.”
But not to me. It was the first time he had drawn such a clear delineation between himself and Der Erlkönig. Between the man he had been and the myth he had become.
I held him tighter, nuzzling against his heartbeat. I pretended it was mortal, that it pulsed in time with mine. His seconds were my hours, his minutes my years.
“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a great king who lived Underground.”
I closed my eyes.
“This king was the ruler of the dead and the living,” he continued. “He brought the world above to life every spring, and brought it back to death every autumn.
“As the seasons turned, one after another, the king grew old. Weary. Spring came later and later and autumn earlier and earlier, until one day, there was no spring at all.” His voice fell. “The world above had gone quiet, dead, and still, and the people suffered.”
I remembered the vivid image of frost tracing the edges of the summer green in the Goblin Grove, and shivered.
“Then, one day, a brave maiden ventured into the Underground,” he went on. “To beg the king to return the world above to spring. She offered the king her life in exchange for the land. My life for my people, she said.”
The burn of tears scalded my lashes. When the Goblin King first told me this tale, I had thought it beautiful. A noble tale of martyrs and sacrifice. But now that I understood the true cost of my life, I found it painful. I was not noble. I was selfish. I wanted to live.
“Der Erlkönig sensed the fire in her,” he said. “And desired its warmth. He had been cold for so long that he no longer remembered light or heat or all that was good in the world. She was the sun and he was the earth waking from a thaw. So he accepted her hand in marriage—a hand given as a lifeline is to a drowning man. He clung to that hand with all his strength, and slowly, surely, they woke the world from winter.”
The Goblin King paused, as though gathering his next words.
“The role of the king underground is a burden, you know,” he said. “Each year, the turning of the seasons becomes harder and harder, for the further away from life and love the years take you, the less human you become. It takes love, you see, to bring the world back to life.”
“How so?” I asked.
“You have to love the land, and the people who live in it. Love is the bridge that spans the world above and below, and keeps the wheel of life turning.”
I remembered Thistle’s words to me. As long as you have a reason to love.
“And then what happened?” My fingers traced the scar across the Goblin King’s heart, wondering at its history.
“And then Der Erlkönig fell in love.”
I waited for the rest of the story, for the Goblin King to continue. But the silence between us stretched and grew taut, until I could bear the tension no longer and broke it.
“And?” I whispered.
“It just occurred to me that I cannot in good conscience give this story a happy ending,” he said. “After all, do they not all end with And they all lived happily ever after?”
A happy ending. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking, but the echo of Twig’s voice rang in my heart. Their love was a bridge, and so they crossed it. Could not the brave maiden have freed her Goblin King? Was her love not strong enough to span both worlds? Mein Herr was not the first; surely he would not be the last.
“Did … did not the brave maiden love Der Erlkönig?” I asked.
The Goblin King stiffened. “I don’t know.”
I bit my lip and turned my face away, unable to meet his gaze. “I think she did. She must have done. Otherwise, how else … how else could you …”
I could not finish.
“Would you like another story, Elisabeth?” The Goblin King’s voice was tight.
I swallowed. “Yes.”
“It is,” he said after a moment, “a story that belongs to me. But I shall leave it up to you to decide whether or not the end is happy.”
I nodded.
“Once upon a time, there was a young man.”
I turned to give him a sharp glance. The Goblin King merely smiled, but whether sad or sweet, I could not tell.
“An austere young man?”
He laughed softly. “Is that what you call … what you call him?”
My cheeks reddened and I was too embarrassed to answer.
“An austere young man,” the Goblin King mused. “I suppose so. Austere, pompous, foolish. Yes, foolish,” he said decidedly. “Once upon a time, there was a foolish young man, who walked the world above in search of wisdom to make him less foolish. One day, he chanced upon a king in the wood, a king underground, who claimed to hold all the secrets of life, love, and Heaven.”