LETTERS FROM A MIDNIGHT WOOD
I woke with a start.
The morning had not yet ripened, and shadows still lingered behind the bedroom door and windowsill. My hands were outstretched before me, reaching blindly out to where I thought Hyacinth stood. My lips were parted in a silent scream and my eyes were still wide at the sight of his bloodstained teeth.
When my dream world at last gave way to the real one, I realized that Hyacinth was nothing more than my bedpost. I looked quickly to where Woferl slept, certain that I had stirred him, but he did not move, and his breathing stayed even.
A deep cold had settled into my bones, and I was shaking so hard that I could barely press my hands together. Something terrible had happened in the Kingdom of Back. Even as I fought to remember it, I felt the horror of the vision fading away, the sharp edges softening. The princess in the tower had my face, formed by my imagination. Had I even seen any of it? Hyacinth was my guardian, and surely that meant he could not have betrayed me.
But something seemed different about the haze in my mind this morning, like a hand had reached into my thoughts and stirred them, turning the clear waters murky. Like someone else had curled inside. I closed my eyes and let myself reach for the final moments of my dream. The queen. The champion. The princess.
Hyacinth was not the princeling of the Kingdom of Back. He had instead destroyed the kingdom, and I had been the one who’d helped him.
“Are you feeling well, Nannerl?”
I jumped at Woferl’s voice. When I looked at him, his eyes were staring, unblinking, back at me. “I did not mean to wake you,” I answered.
“I had a strange dream,” Woferl said.
A thread of fear coiled through me and tightened. “What happened in it?” I asked.
“I was in a city. It was burning to the ground; the fire nipped at my skin and the smoke blinded my eyes.”
“A city? Lille?”
“No.” His voice was flat. “A city with no name.”
It was Hyacinth’s doing, this dream of his. I could feel his presence in the spaces between my brother’s words, teeth sinking into the air. I waited for Woferl to speak again. When he just rolled away and closed his eyes, I turned on my side and stared at the strengthening light peeking in from the window.
Hyacinth was not the kingdom’s princeling.
It meant that his wish, to reclaim his birthright and his throne, to reunite with his sister, was also a lie. What was his true wish, then? He had bargained with me . . . to what end? I thought of the hunger in his eyes at the top of the tower, all he had done and all he’d had me do.
He had wanted to devour the princess at the top of the castle.
My gaze returned to the fragile, curled form of my brother, his chest rising and falling in a gentle rhythm. A thought began to take shape. Had Hyacinth not once told me that the young prince was never found? That the Queen of the Night never knew what happened to her child? Hyacinth was not the kingdom’s princeling, but someone was. And if Hyacinth had wanted all along to devour the princess, perhaps he now hungered for the princeling too.
Perhaps it was the reason Woferl pricked his finger on the night flower. The reason for his illnesses. The reason for his strange dreams, the faraway look in his eyes. Most of all, perhaps it was the reason for Hyacinth’s promise to fulfill my wish. The air around me felt too thin now. I shifted, dizzy from the truth.
Woferl was the young princeling of the Kingdom of Back.
And perhaps, perhaps, everything Hyacinth had done was in order to find a way to claim Woferl’s soul in the same way he had claimed the princess.
You can be remembered, if he is forgotten. So let me take him away, Fräulein. I heard the words whispered as clearly as if he were standing beside me.
Deep in a corner of my mind, Hyacinth blinked in the dark, stirred, and smiled.
* * *
As we left Lille for Amsterdam, then Rotterdam, then the Austrian Netherlands, strange things started to happen.
Snow fell during one of our concerts on a sunny afternoon. News came from London that an unusual plague had broken out in England’s countryside. At the same time, we began to hear reports of vicious attacks across France, of man-eating wolf dogs prowling the mountain paths near Périgord.
“Herr von Grimm said the Beast of Gévaudan has a tail as long as I am tall,” Woferl said, knees on his chair as we ate a supper of lentil soup and spaetzle. He stretched his arms out. “And twice the rows of teeth of any wolf.”
Mama scolded him to sit down properly, while Papa chuckled. “And what makes you believe everything Herr von Grimm has to say?” he asked.
Woferl brightened, hungry to coax more smiles out of our father. “Well, he said I knew more at my age than most kapellmeisters in Europe.” He glanced at me. “He said Nannerl had the finest execution on the harpsichord. Isn’t that all truth?”
I looked up at my brother’s praise. His eyes darted to me for an instant before flickering away. He was curious about my mood lately, my quiet spells and faraway expressions. This was his way of reaching out to me.
I gave him a careful, practiced expression of gratitude. “You are very kind, Woferl,” I said to him. “Thank you.”
Woferl’s joy dampened at my response. He knew it was the kind of polite answer I gave to the nobility we played for, whenever I wanted to leave a good impression. He stared at me, searching for the truth beneath my trained response, but I just looked away from him and back to my plate. Perhaps he thought I was still angry with him because of my music. And perhaps I was. But I could not look at him without remembering what had happened in the kingdom, and what Hyacinth might want with him.
Papa sensed none of this odd tension between us. He laughed genuinely. Few things pleased him more than a reminder of courts impressed by our performances, and Herr von Grimm had indeed said those words when we’d played for the Prince of Conti in Paris during an afternoon tea.
Mama paused to meet our father’s eye. “It might not be a bad plan to avoid the mountain paths,” she said meaningfully to him.
Papa waved a nonchalant hand as he stirred his soup. “Nothing more than tales exaggerated by panicked witnesses, no doubt. There have been no reports from around Paris.”
“Louis XV himself has put a bounty on any wolf corpse brought in to him,” Mama said. “If the king fears this beast, then perhaps we should as well.”
“Beast.” Papa said the word through a twisting mouth, his distaste for the imaginary souring his good mood. “There is no such thing as a beast.”
I ate quietly. The conversation swirled around me like the waters of a murky lake, and my family smeared into distortion. None of us had said another word about my music published as a birthday present for the Prince of Orange. It was possible that my father had already forgotten all about it, that he had been paid his coin and promptly tucked my music away in some dusty corner of his mind.