Her eyes softened. “An offering,” she amended. “When I was a girl, we used to leave bread and milk as a tithe, a portion of our hard-earned work. But these are not the lean times they were when I was young. You must bring the Goblin King an offering that costs you something; after all, is that not the meaning of sacrifice?”
“I don’t have anything,” I said. “Only people. And I’ve already sacrificed one I love to Der Erlkönig, Constanze; I’ll not risk any more.”
“Do you truly have nothing?” There was something in the tone of my grandmother’s voice that chilled my blood.
“Nothing,” I repeated, but my voice was less sure than before.
“Oh, but I think you do.” Her words were soft, sinister. “Something you love more than your sister, more than Josef, more than life itself.”
My mind did not comprehend her meaning, but my body knew. My body was cleverer than I. It went cold, and then numb with stillness.
My music.
I would have to sacrifice my music.
SACRIFICE
I should have known it would come to this.
As dusk began to fall outside, I knelt before the bed—the bed my sister and I had shared our entire lives—and reached for the lockbox I knew would be hidden there. My fingers scraped and searched, but stopped when they brushed over something smooth and polished.
The elegant stranger’s gift.
I had all but forgotten about it since we returned from the market that fateful day Käthe had taken that bite of goblin fruit.
I do not offer this gift to you out of the goodness of my heart, but out of a selfish need to see what you might do with it.
And what had I done with the Goblin King’s gift? I had taken it and hidden it away, like it was something secret, something shameful. Perhaps my lack of faith had cost me everything after all.
I drew out my box of compositions from beneath my bed and opened it. It looked like nothing: bits of foolscap, pages torn from my father’s unused accounting books, the backs of old hymnals—the sad, pathetic treasure hoard of an unlovely, untalented child.
Closing the lockbox, I got to my feet and walked to the klavier. Its presence in the room was both bane and balm, a reminder of all I had dreamed of and all I would never gain. I ran my hands over its surface, feeling the hours that had chipped away at the ivory keys and twisted and warped the strings within.
My latest composition still lay open on the music stand. Across the top, in my best handwriting: Für meine Lieben, ein Lied im stil die Bagatelle, auch Der Erlkönig.
For my loved ones, a song in the style of a bagatelle, or The Goblin King.
Below that, in a hasty scrawl:
For Sepperl, may he never forget.
For Käthe, all my love and my forgiveness.
I shuffled the leaves together, stacking them neatly, before tying them with a length of twine from my sewing kit.
The pages looked plain and forlorn, sitting unadorned on my keyboard. If I were Käthe, I would have dressed them with a bit of ribbon or lace, or some dried wildflowers from the summer meadow. I had nothing but a few catkins dropped from the alder trees in the Goblin Grove.
But perhaps that was the most fitting decoration after all.
With my shears, I snipped a lock of hair and tied it with the catkins to the sheet music. My latest composition, and my last. My gift to my loved ones, my farewell. If I could not give them one last embrace, one last kiss, then I could give them this: my truest expression of self, to safeguard in their keeping. I left the composition on the bed.
Then, gathering both the flute and the lockbox, I turned from the klavier, from the room, from home, toward the Goblin Grove and beyond.
* * *
Constanze stood at the bottom of the stairs.
“Are you ready, Elisabeth?”
It was the first time my grandmother had ever called me by name. Shivers ran through me, not of dread, but of anticipation.
“Liesl,” I said. “Call me Liesl.”
Constanze shook her head. “Elisabeth. I like the name Elisabeth. It’s a name for a grown woman, not a girl.”
In her words I heard the echo of the Goblin King. But I chose to draw strength from them. For all our differences, Constanze believed in me. She handed me a cloak and a lantern. To my surprise, she also handed me a slice of Gugelhopf, which she had not made for me since I was a child.
“An offering for Der Erlkönig.” She wrapped the cake in a piece of linen. “From me. He will not have forgotten the taste of my Gugelhopf so soon, I should think.”
I smiled. “Nor will I, Constanze.”
We faced each other one last time. No tears, no farewells. My grandmother did not countenance sentimentality. She merely patted me on the shoulder.
“Viel Glück, Elisabeth.” She did not say we would meet again.
I followed Constanze through the back door of the inn. She did not direct me on my way, but it did not matter. I knew exactly where I was going.
“Servus, Constanze,” I said softly. “Go with God. And thank you.”
Constanze nodded. She had no words of encouragement, no blessing for my journey. But the cake in its linen wrapping was as good as a benediction from my grandmother. I took it, and left.
* * *
The night was clear, and the air had the breath of winter upon it, death and ice and slumber. I held the lantern aloft, illuminating the path ahead.
The Goblin Grove lay in the distance, the only bit of the forest wreathed in mist. The mist formed spectral shapes before my eyes, suggesting the hump of a goblin’s back or the curve of a nymph’s cheek, but nothing—no one—materialized. I would have no audience tonight.