They will not make it easy. But I have faith, Elisabeth, faith in you.
I was careful of my step, but the malice of the Underground was deviously clever. A crevice suddenly opened up beneath my feet, and I tripped and wrenched my ankle. Wincing with pain, I trod on the hem of my skirt, tumbling head over heels. I wiped at my stinging chin.
Blood.
The instant a drop of my blood hit the earth, a storm of hissing arose. This was the opportunity the goblins had been waiting for.
The clacking cacophony grew and swelled, like waves approaching some distant shore. Hands burst from beneath my feet—hands like gnarled and twisted branches, growing from the earth like brambles or vines. They grabbed at my ankles, my hair, my dress, my shoes, any part of me they could reach.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Stop!”
The corridors echoed with the sounds of their hands coming free, rattling off like gunshots. I covered my head and my ears as hands burst forth from the walls and the ceiling overhead, reaching, reaching, reaching. The hallways echoed with my screams.
“Stop! Please! I wish you would stop!”
But my wishes no longer had any power here. Crawling hands, myriad eyes, pointed teeth, all reaching to devour me, tear me apart limb from limb. Fingers twined about my feet brought me crashing down onto their waiting hands, a creature felled by a snare. I shrieked, struggling to break their grip, but their knobby fingers were strong. The hands bore me down into darkness, musty and rank with the sour scent of my panic.
Oh, God, oh, God, I thought. I will be buried alive.
Buried alive; what an ignominious end. Sacrificing my life for spring had been noble, but this? This was a terrible way to die. Not with a bang, but a whimper. I thought of the trees in the Goblin Grove, their uncomfortably human branches, and wondered if that was to be my fate, my limbs and shape immortalized by dead wood.
“What do you want from me?” I cried.
You, you, you, their hissing voices returned. We want you. You cannot leave the Underground, mortal, not without paying the price.
“What price?” Goblin hands crawled over my mouth and neck, as though to strangle the sounds coming from me. “Tell me and I shall pay it!”
The scuttling hands stopped. A few of them broke away to join together, their curled fingers and thumbs forming two eyes, a nose, a mouth. I was staring into a face.
There were only holes where the eyes should have been, only darkness inside its maw of a mouth. Yet I sensed a presence there, many goblins joined into a singular entity. I stared into the abyss, and found it staring back.
“What is it that you want?” I asked.
It was a while before those fingers could work together to form lips, a tongue, words.
You have something that belongs to us, mortal. Myriad voices joined together as one, a dissonant mass of pitches.
“What—”
It lives in the world above. More hands had come together to make a more complete face. High cheekbones. A pointed chin. Curls. The features were familiar. Free from our reach. Our influence.
Cold fear trickled into my veins, slowly turning me to ice. “No.”
Yes, they hissed. You know of whom we speak.
I shook my head. I did know of whom they spoke; they spoke of Josef. But I wasn’t going to give my brother up to the goblins.
The changeling, mortal, they said. The one you freed with the power of a wish. We want it back. It has no place among you humans; it belongs down here. With us. With its kin, here in the Underground.
“No.”
Yes, they repeated.
“No!”
The hands tightened about me.
We want it, they said again. It is rightfully ours. Bring it back, maiden. Bring it back.
It. As though my baby brother were an animal. As though he didn’t have a name, a life, a personhood. Josef might have been a changeling, but he was no less human than me, than Käthe, than all those who loved him.
“No,” I choked out. “He does not belong to you.”
Nor does he belong to you.
“No,” I gasped. “Josef belongs to himself.”
Those goblin hands squeezed tighter, and a sparkling blackness began to fill the corners of my vision. Your love is a cage, mortal. Set him free.
I laughed. It was lost amidst choking coughs as twining hands strangled the life from me, but I laughed nonetheless. I could no more stop loving Sepperl than I could stop the sun from rising each dawn.
Your love is killing him.
My laughs turned to sobs. Tears leaked from my eyes, scalding hot and salty. They tasted of my reluctance, my despair, but most of all, my love for the little changeling boy who stayed in the world above because he wanted to play music. Josef had died all those years ago, but my true brother, the brother of my heart, still lived. My tears dripped onto goblin hands, staining them with love.
A hiss of pain rose from them all, a collective susurrus like the sighing of branches in the wood. Multi-jointed fingers uncurled from my wrists, my arms, my waist, dropping me to the ground.
It burns! they cried. It burns!
Once released, I coughed and gulped down great gasps of air as all around me, echoes of It burns! It burns! blended with warnings of Your love is killing him into a symphony of discord.
I lay on my side, there on the floor of the dirty corridor, long after the goblin hands had disappeared. For although their voices had faded away, the damning words remained.
Your love is killing him.
* * *
I don’t know how long I lay there, crushed beneath the crippling weight of my doubt.
As long as you have a reason to love, Thistle had said. Love kept the wheel of life turning. Love created bridges between worlds. If there was nothing else I had learned, I had learned that love was greater than the old laws.