Woferl and I had never been to an opera before. Papa had always been too worried that we could not sit through a performance without wriggling in our seats. So I tried to keep my composure and remember the lessons Mama had taught me. I needed to behave like a proper young lady. Still, my eyes wandered up to the opera house’s grand, arched entrances and white pillars, and down to its veined marble floors and rich velvet carpets. Gold banisters, curved stairways, and ceilings covered in rich paintings. The nobles attended these every week. I wondered if they still gaped in awe each time, and if the sights and sounds could still take their breaths away.

Woferl held my hand in earnest and stared so hard at the gentlemen and ladies we passed that I feared I would need to catch him if he fell. We settled with Papa and Mama in our own balcony. In a private box near us, a group of spectators had already taken out their playing cards and started a game, while down below, young men filed through the aisles to flirt with the ladies. They were all beautiful, I thought, women in wide, sweeping skirts and ruffled half-sleeves, their headdresses adorned with feathers, and gentlemen on their arms with shining jackets and bright, blinking canes.

As they flitted about below, I began to imagine that we were in the kingdom, and that I sat alone on a giant root of an upside-down tree, quietly looking on as the kingdom’s creatures—these colorful birds—gathered below me. I imagined them turned in my direction, staring back up at me, and smiling. I glanced at Woferl, who in turn watched the opera stage in anticipation. When I told him about my vision of the plumed birds, we grinned together at the absurdity of it and tried to think of strange names for them.

“Papageno,” Woferl declared one of the more ridiculous headdresses, and mouthed the name so comically, Pa-pa-pa-papageno, that he dissolved into giggles.

I hushed him even as we laughed conspiratorially. “You will get us kicked out.”

“No, I won’t,” he replied as we rose with the orchestra for the conductor. “I’ll be down there one day, and it will be me they clamor for.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will be before the orchestra,” he said, clapping along. “Someday I’ll write an aria, Nannerl—the most difficult aria ever written, and they’ll clap for me even louder than this.”

I laughed. “You put yourself above Herr Handel. Don’t you know the king of England himself once stood in delight for his oratorio?”

A grin of delight crossed his cherubic face. “When I play, the kings of Europe will all stand for the entirety of my opera.”

He would be directing the orchestra, I realized, and the premonition in his words appeared before me in all its future splendor, him a young man in a red coat, weaving his music to life. I would be on the ground, staring upward to see my brother at the top of the upside-down tree. I would be a lady with feathers in her wig and no quill in her hand, looking on in silence.

Suddenly, I felt angry at Woferl, though I knew it was not his fault. I thought of his outlandish antics onstage, the way people adored him for it. They would relish him even more when he was grown, fawn over his winking eyes and quicksilver smile.

And I . . . it was impossible for me to do the same. The truth of that burned in my chest, hollowing me out from the inside. No matter how talented I was, no matter how well I performed or how much I charmed—I could never stand where Woferl would.

From a higher balcony, I spied Hyacinth with a hand of cards. He turned to watch us, his blue eyes glowing. I looked up by instinct and met his gaze. At long last, he was here. He stared at me for a moment, reading the weight in my eyes, tapping the cards thoughtfully against his cheek. Then, finally, he smiled.

Woferl waited for me to respond to his declaration about putting on an opera, but I pretended that I could not hear him through the applause.

THE ARROW

When Hyacinth visited our bedchamber that night, I was already awake and waiting for him. Somehow, I’d known at the opera that he would come for me tonight. He looked once at my brother, but this time he did not bother to address him. Instead, he let him sleep.

“You’ve grown taller,” Hyacinth said to me.

So had he, I realized, his lithe, boyish shape now transformed into something leaner and stronger, and the forest hue of his skin paled even further, white seeping into his hands and arms like frost curls over dew.

“Why have you come back only now?” I asked him in a hushed voice.

“I needed to know exactly how to help you,” he replied, flashing me a quick smile. “I was waiting for a sign from you. I finally got it at the opera.”

He had been waiting for my anger to rise? “How will that help me?” I asked. “Or you?”

“It is time for you to complete your third task.” He looked over his shoulder, jewels clinking in his hair, toward the moon hanging over the city’s rooftops. He beckoned to me. “But we must hurry tonight, Fräulein. You have only a short time to retrieve what I need.”

I could feel the threads of his urgency tugging against my heart. My legs swung over the side of my bed, my bare feet crept across the cold floorboards. I followed him out of our inn and into the street, where drunken revelers were still staggering home. None of them seemed to notice me, although one man squinted in confusion as Hyacinth passed him, as if he had seen some kind of shadow rippling against the wall.

As we went, moss began to cover the street’s cobblestones in a silver blanket. Ivy trailed out from the cracks between the rocks. In the sky, the twin moons shone bright and round as coins, separated now by only a couple of arm’s lengths. Crooked trees arched in between buildings. When I turned to look at them, I noticed that their branches were bare, as if they were roots reaching up to the sky.

They grew thicker and thicker, until soon they crowded out the buildings altogether, leaving us hurrying along a mossy path that wound through a now-familiar forest. Faeries dotted the night air, illuminating our path with their light.

Hyacinth broke into a run. I struggled to keep up with him as he darted along the path, barely visible in the darkness ahead of me.

Finally, we arrived in a meadow blanketed with bright silver flowers, their petals dancing in the breeze. Among them lingered the faeries, and when Hyacinth arrived, it was as if all of them came alive at once, their light surrounding us in excitement and their tiny teeth nipping at my ankles. The blue grass beneath our feet waved and sighed.

“There,” Hyacinth told me, pointing at a yawning arc of stone that connected two cliffs. Rock pillars formed a large circle underneath the bridge, a valley heavily overgrown with trees and brush. “Long ago, this was all a cavern. When the oceans lowered, it collapsed, until all that remains is this arc of stone.” I followed the line of his finger to the underbrush. “Down there, when the moon is shining directly above the land bridge, you will find a golden crossbow fitted with a single arrow.”