I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

But Hyacinth had already turned away and motioned for us to follow him back into the woods. I looked down at Woferl again. He seemed tired, and his long lashes dripped water. A bright spot of blood pooled on his thumb. He had pricked his finger on the flower’s thorns.

* * *

I woke with a start. Gone were the ocean and the faery queen and the night flower. Gone was the princeling. I was lying in my own bed with Woferl breathing gently next to me, his eyes quivering ever so slightly underneath his lids. He had one of his thumbs in his mouth, a habit that returned whenever he dreamed. I stared at the ceiling.

A dream. The words echoed in my mind. But it had all felt so vibrant. The shore had been so white, the shells so blue, the water so warm. The witch’s eyes so dark. Still, it must have been a dream. Had to have been. What had Hyacinth said he needed the flower for? I couldn’t remember. Nor could I think of what we had done after we surfaced again. Hyacinth had praised us, hadn’t he?

I looked at Woferl again, then gently pulled his thumb out of his mouth. There, along the top of the tender flesh, was a small cut and a drop of blood. He must have bitten his thumb a little too hard during the night, I thought.

But the vision of the night flower’s thorns and Hyacinth’s smile had not yet faded away. I continued to stare at my brother until the room began to blur again, until this time I sank into a dreamless sleep.

THE CASTLE ON THE HILL

Woferl seemed quieter than usual the next morning. He lay in bed beside me, round cheeks flushed, sleep still glazing his eyes, and listened without a word as I told him about my dream.

“We went together to the white sand beach,” I said. “We saw the Queen of the Night, a witch trapped in an underwater grotto there. She was very frightening.”

Woferl murmured his astonishment as I told him about how we escaped from the grotto and ended up giving the night flower to Hyacinth. But his wonder felt muted, his attention scattered. The glaze in his eyes gave them a feverish shine.

“Are you all right, Woferl?” I asked when I finished my story.

He shrugged and curled up tighter in bed. I glimpsed a tiny scar on his thumb from where he’d bitten it in his sleep. “My throat is just a little dry,” he said, and dozed off again.

Papa always left early and did not come back until later in the day, when Woferl switched from practicing on his violin to the clavier. So the morning hours were mine, a time when I could play without being disturbed, when no one came in to check on my progress or how many times I had run flawlessly through a menuett.

Mama was out, so the only person with me this morning was Woferl. Now that he knew about my composition, and had managed to keep it from Papa, I felt safer with him nearby, someone with whom I could share the burden of a secret. He sat with me on the clavier’s bench, his elbows propped up on the keys, watching intently as I played my scale.

After I paused to turn to a different piece in my notebook, he said to me, quite abruptly, “I wish you would write more music.”

I stopped to look at him.

Woferl flipped to the second to last page of my notebook, and pointed out the few measures I’d written. “You never finished this one,” he said.

All I could hear was my father’s voice in my head, and the words he’d spoken to Mama over dinner yesterday. Nannerl makes an excellent companion for Woferl. Together their fame is twice what it could be. Can you imagine the spectacle we could create if one day Nannerl performed one of Woferl’s compositions?

Mama had listened and nodded. Of course, it would be preposterous to suggest that I could compose my own pieces.

In truth, I was an excellent companion. But I would be nothing more than a performer for my brother’s compositions. If I wanted immortality, it would not come from my writing. The words hung weighted around my neck. Composition was for men. It was an obvious rule. What would others think of my father if they knew I composed behind his back? That he could not even control his own daughter? What kind of girl shamed her father by secretly doing a man’s work?

The image of my compositions burning in the fire flashed before me, the thought of my father’s stern eyes . . . I had seen Papa toss letters in a rage into the stove, remembered watching the embers light the edges of those papers. The memory made me wince. Even seeing my little tune exposed here on the page was making my heart quicken. I glanced nervously toward the door, half expecting Papa to step in at this very moment, and then turned to a different menuett.

“I can’t,” I replied to Woferl.

He frowned. “Why not?” he asked.

“I’m afraid to.”

“But don’t you want to?”

“Of course, but it is different with me.”

“Music is music. The source of it does not matter so much.”

I sighed. “Woferl,” I chided him, and he had the grace to give me a guilty look. “I cannot do what you do. It is something you will never ever understand.”

He pouted at me in frustration. His tongue had sharpened when it came to composition. Everyone fancies himself a musician, he’d complained to me. No one respects the soul of it. I’d seen him turn Papa’s face red with embarrassment when he once scoffed at the skills of a local noble who had given composition, in his words, a whirl.

Charlatan, Woferl had called him to his face. I would have been reprimanded harshly for saying such a thing to a nobleman, but Papa just chuckled about it later.

My brother did not reply again. Instead, he hurried off, and I returned to my lessons.

Minutes later, he returned with a quill and inkwell.

“Woferl!” I exclaimed, pausing in my playing. But he did not apologize. Instead, he adjusted the writing instruments and pointed the quill’s feather in my direction.

I began to tremble at the sight of it. This was not Woferl at work. This was God taunting me, tempting me to write again. Or, perhaps, it was Hyacinth, his will bubbling up from my brother’s sweet eyes. Was I hearing the words of the princeling on Woferl’s lips?

“Will you do it?” he whispered eagerly to me.

“Woferl, this is Papa’s,” I said. “How will we explain that it is not in its place?”

Woferl simply closed the notebook and gestured to a loose sheet propped against the clavier stand. “I have started to write,” he said. “Papa will know the ink is here because I use it daily. How would he know about you?”

I felt my cheeks grow warm at the thought. “But, Woferl,” I protested. “Where will I write mine? I cannot continue to compose in my notebook. Sooner or later Papa will see, and that will be the end of it.”