I buried my face in my hands.
I heard Constanze stir in her seat, turning to face me. If she were a different sort of grandmother, she might have beckoned me close so that she might place her gnarled hands upon my head, stroking my brow while murmuring comforting words.
But Constanze was not that sort of grandmother.
“Well, girlie, what is it you want from me?” she snapped. “Tell me quickly so you’ll leave me in peace.”
Constanze hardly ever called either Käthe or me by our names, given or otherwise; we were always “girl” or “you,” as though we were extraneous, superfluous, or otherwise unimportant.
“I want …” My voice was hoarse, barely a whisper. “I want you to tell me how to gain entrance to the Underground.”
She said nothing.
“Please.” I lifted my head. “Please, Constanze.”
“There is nothing you can do,” she said, and the finality of her words was worse than her contempt. “Haven’t you been listening? Your sister is for the Goblin King now. It is too late.”
Until the next full moon, or your sister is lost forever.
How much time had passed in this fever dream? Had the full moon risen? I tried to count the weeks, but the passage of time had gone unmarked in my halcyon daze.
“It is not too late.” I prayed it was true. “I have until the next full moon.”
This time Constanze’s silence was less scornful than surprised. “Did he … did he speak to you?”
“Yes.” I wrung my hands. “In the Goblin King’s own words, I have until the next full moon to find my way into his realm.”
But she did not seem to hear a word I said. “He spoke … to you?” she repeated. “Why you?”
I frowned. Acid no longer etched her tones with biting distaste, but a lingering vulnerability traced her words. In them, I heard, Why you … and not me?
“Have you—have you met Der Erlkönig?” I asked.
It was a long moment before she replied. “Yes,” she said. “You are not the only maiden to have had foolish, girlish dreams of Der Erlkönig, you know. You are not the only one to have danced with him in the wood. Like you, I once dreamed he would take me away, to be his bride in the Underground.” She looked away. “But he never did. Perhaps,” she said sardonically, “I was not pretty enough for him either.”
Sympathy beat in my chest for Constanze. Unlike Käthe, unlike Mother, Constanze understood what it was to be plain, overlooked, ignored. Käthe’s and Mother’s beauty ensured they would never be forgotten; their stories would live on in someone else’s narrative, as beautiful women always did. People would remember their names. Women like Constanze and me were relegated to the footnotes, to the background, nameless and unimportant.
“What happened?” I asked softly.
She shrugged. “I grew up.”
“All children do,” I said. “And yet, you still believe.”
Constanze returned my gaze with a long, hard stare. Then she gestured to the footstool beside her with a nod. I came and knelt at her feet, just as I had when I was young.
“I believe because I must,” she said. “Lest the consequences prove disastrous.”
“What consequences?”
It was a long while before Constanze spoke.
“You don’t know,” she croaked. “You could never know what the world was like when Der Erlkönig and his subjects walked among us. It was a dark age, an age before reason, enlightenment, and God.”
I resisted the urge to ask how she knew. Constanze was old, but not that old. Instead, I let myself be young again in her presence, to settle into the rhythms and cadences of her story, lulled by the rise and fall of her speech.
“It was an age of blood, violence, and war,” she continued, “a time when man and goblin fought—over land, over water, over flesh. Beautiful flesh, sweet and tempting, the flesh of maidens, full of light and life. The goblins saw them as sustenance, men saw them as otherwise.”
Pointed teeth over razor-thin lips. I shuddered, remembering how juice from the enchanted peach had flowed over Käthe’s mouth and throat like blood.
“Blood spilled as easily as rain, soaking the land, salting the earth, turning it red beneath our feet with the remains of the dead, burying the harvest beneath rage, grief, and sorrow. Der Erlkönig heard the cries of the land, stifled by death and war, and stretched out his hands. In his right, he gathered Man; in his left, the goblins, dividing one from the other. And so, Der Erlkönig has ever stood between us and them, between the world of the living and the dead, the ordinary and the uncanny.”
“How lonely,” I murmured. I thought of the tall, elegant stranger in the marketplace, the first guise in which the Goblin King had shown himself to me, more man than myth. Even then, he had stood alone and apart, and his loneliness called to my own. My cheeks flushed with the memory.
Constanze gave me a sharp glance. “Lonely, yes. But does the king serve the crown, or the crown serve the king?”
We sat in silence.
“How then, Constanze,” I said at last, “do I gain entrance to the Underground?”
For a long moment, I was afraid my grandmother would not give me a straight answer. Then she sighed.
“Der Erlkönig is bound by an ancient sacrifice,” she said, “so we honor him with our own.”
“A sacrifice?”