“I am,” I replied. And I was. My bones had grown restless, and my music ached to be heard again.

But the same nagging feeling I’d had the morning after my dream of the ogre still lingered with me. Hyacinth had not appeared to me again since then, weeks ago. I wrote my music and waited for him. Beside me, Woferl composed reams and reams of new work. He would hand them to Papa, would beam as my father beamed. I’d look on, and then hide my music in my drawer.

Woferl did not ask me about Hyacinth. So I began to wonder if the princeling was appearing separately to Woferl. Would he do such a thing? Was Hyacinth only my guardian, or did he have others to whom he made secret promises?

There was also another reason for my uneasiness. My monthly courses had arrived.

The first time it happened was at a Wasserburg inn, and the blood had startled me so much that I wept. Mama tried to console me, helping me change out of my stained petticoat and undergarments, sending a maid out into Wasserburg to buy new clothes. She fussed over me and brushed my hair, helped me bathe, did not comment on the fish I let sit on my dinner plate, and sang to me in bed.

“The pain will pass in several days,” she told me. “Don’t be afraid. I am delighted for you.”

I liked to see my mother happy, so I smiled for her. “I’m not afraid, Mama,” I said. Neither of us talked about how I could no longer pretend I was anything but a girl slowly becoming a woman, that it was a reminder of my dwindling years performing before the public.

By the time we left for the small town of Biberich, I’d begun to notice small changes in my body. When Mama helped me dress in the mornings, the lacing of my clothes cut my breath shorter than usual. The inner bone of the bodice pressed harder against my breasts. My cheekbones looked more pronounced, and something about my face made my eyes look larger than I remembered them, dark ponds set in snow. I had also grown taller. Mama had to fix my dresses twice in the course of six months.

My father’s past words stayed with me. The older we were, the less magnificent we seemed. The approach of my eighteenth birthday, the end of my years as a child prodigy, suddenly seemed very close.

We traveled through the summer, stopping throughout Germany at Biberich, and then Wiesbaden, and then Kostheim. Our days became a blur of inns. The Three Moors. The Golden Wheel. The Giant. The Red House. Spectators would crowd into the inns’ main rooms, jostling one another in order to see us. We performed at palaces whenever we secured an invitation. Newspaper headlines followed us as we went. The Mozart children will perform tonight, they’d always say. Look how young they are. Look at their skill.

Our travels continued and at some point, I could no longer remember which town we had come from or even which we were currently staying in. At night, I lay awake in bed and tried to imagine what our trip looked like from the clouds in the Kingdom of Back, whether we resembled the tiny villages in the snow or the troops rippling across the battlefield. I wondered what flaws the kingdom’s mirrored world showed about us.

I didn’t dare compose music during this time. Papa was watching us very closely, staying beside us during our clavier lessons late into the night. So I had to indulge myself by watching Woferl write instead.

He had gotten it into his mind recently to compose a symphony; and while he loved our father, he stubbornly told Papa one evening that he preferred to write his music alone, free from his watchful gaze. Papa had raised an eyebrow at him. But he did not linger near the clavier the next night when Woferl began to write, and instead went downstairs with Mama and Sebastian.

Only I was allowed to watch Woferl as he composed.

“Do you hear the violins in your head, separately from the others, and then the cellos and basses?” I asked him.

He glanced at me, but his attention stayed focused on his music. “Sometimes,” he said. “But I also hear them at the same time, as if in four different lines. Each sounds very different.” He shook his head. “Remind me to give the horns something worthwhile to do.”

I watched him write down another measure. “This is not meant for horns,” I said. The piece was light, full of playful footsteps and dancing scales. I had to giggle. “You are cruel. The violins will have a hard time keeping up with you.”

Woferl shook his head. He was serious, wholly absorbed in his music. “That’s because Hyacinth is running away from them, and they cannot catch him.” He reached over and pointed to a measure. “You see? He is sprinting through the forest, up a hill, higher and higher, and then when he reaches the top, he slides all the way down. He likes to lead them deep into the forest, so that they cannot find their way out, and then to reward himself, he naps in one of the trees.” His finger guided me across the lines of music, so that I could hear the scenes he explained.

I smiled, but the mention of Hyacinth unsettled me. Woferl hadn’t forgotten about him. Again, I wondered whether the princeling had been appearing to my brother in his dreams too. Why else would Woferl be thinking of Hyacinth so much that he was writing him into his music? The envy that came with the thought was like a poison in my mind.

“You are a tease,” I said.

Woferl dipped his quill into the inkwell again and scribbled faster, so that large droplets of ink splattered on the page and he had to wipe it away with the ball of his fist. The ink smeared across the page, like a child’s painting. “You are a tease, Nannerl. You write music, and then you hide it away.”

My brother’s words hovered in the air, hung there as if the starfishers from the Kingdom of Back had caught them in their hooks. Suddenly, I felt as if we were not truly alone in the room. A slight movement by the window caught my attention, but vanished when I turned to look directly at it. It had seemed like a ghost of a familiar face, a sharp smile and a pair of bright eyes.

“I tease only you,” I said to Woferl, nudging him once. “Because only you know it exists.”

When Woferl laughed, it was someone else, the sound of wind through reeds.

* * *

It was not until we arrived in Frankfurt that I began to understand what my monthly courses and longer dresses truly meant.

Our first performance in the city happened on the Liebfrauenberg.

Woferl and I did not play the entire time at this performance. The local orchestra performed first, for some time, and then a young woman sung an aria. Woferl played, expectedly, more than I did. I accompanied his violin concerto on the clavier, and performed two other pieces with the orchestra. But for the most part I remained quiet on the sidelines next to my father, looking out into the crowd, and this is when I caught sight of a boy.

There were many young children there, restless and tugging at the coattails of their parents, and adults, but there were few in between—and he was in between. My eyes skimmed right past him the first time and returned to Woferl, who played on the clavier with a cloth tied over his eyes.