I followed his lead. The memory of his sugar-sweet kiss came back to me now. I could feel the cold press of his hand against the small of my back. If Johann were here, would he dance with me too? Would his hand be warm against my skin?

“You’re quiet tonight,” Hyacinth said to me in a low voice.

“Why did you bring me here?” I said to him.

He smiled, amused. “Is the Fräulein angry with me, I wonder?”

“You don’t belong here, in this castle.”

“I should. The queen had banned me from her court, distasteful woman that she was.”

“You killed the princess in the tower.”

“In some ways, she was already dead, wasn’t she? Are you truly alive if you spend your entire life locked in a tower, hidden away for so long that you wouldn’t even know to flee if the door opened for you?”

His words rang deep in my chest, as true and clear as the music of him that had first called to me all those years ago. His irises were gold, hypnotizing me. Are you alive, Nannerl? they seemed to say to me. Don’t you want to be?

My lips tightened. Here we were, playing his games again. But today I was tired of them. “Tell me what you want with me,” I said.

Hyacinth smiled and spun me again. The world turned in a dizzy circle, his face at its center. “Don’t you remember what we’d agreed to in the very beginning?”

Make them remember me. How long ago that wish of mine seemed. How much had happened since then.

Hyacinth pulled me close, his hand cool against the small of my waist. “A bargain is a bargain. You have helped me, and so I shall help you. There is only one thing left for us to do.”

“What is it?”

He drew close to whisper in my ear. His coat of skeleton leaves brushed roughly against me. “Bring your brother here, to the castle.”

Woferl. Fingers of ice trailed their way down my spine. “What do you want with him?”

“Leave him here.”

Leave him here.

“When you bring him and then return to your world, he will not come with you. Let me keep him here with me. He will bring his music to the kingdom, and you will bring yours to the world beyond. It will be a perfect trade.”

Something in Hyacinth’s voice had turned very dark, a growl trembling beneath his soft words. “You want to keep him in the kingdom forever?”

Hyacinth’s eyes glowed. “Woferl was never meant to stay long in your world, after all,” he said. “He is the princeling of this kingdom. You know that. From the moment he was born, you knew the fragility on his face and the paper of his limbs. One illness after another will continue to ravage him, until he is nothing more. That is his curse. He has always been suspended between one world and another. It’s time. Give him to me, Nannerl, and you shall finally have what you’ve always wanted.”

The beat of my heart crashed against my ears. This, at last, was the merging of our wishes. Hyacinth wanted my brother, the princeling of the Kingdom of Back—and if I helped hand him over, I would receive what I’d asked for.

Without my brother, I would be the only one my father had. What other name could appear on a volume of music? They would have no choice but to remember me.

I shrank away from him in horror. He waited, humored, as I stood a few feet apart from him, trembling from the suggestion, unable to look away from his golden eyes. The world around me blurred. A lightness pervaded my mind.

“I can sense the pull in your heart, Fräulein,” he said, taking a step toward me again.

I pictured my brother sitting in the highest tower, looking down at the dark river. I pictured Hyacinth’s eyes trained on him. “What will you do with him, once he’s here?” I whispered. My voice sounded like it came from somewhere outside of me. Hyacinth’s eyes pulsed in rhythm with my heartbeat.

“Oh, Nannerl.” Hyacinth sighed. He kissed me gently on the cheek. “The question is always about him, isn’t it? What will you do, once he’s here?”

My lips parted and nothing came out.

“Write a composition for me, Fräulein,” Hyacinth whispered. “The song of your heart. When you play it, I will call for you. Bring your brother with you then. I’ll be waiting for you both in this castle courtyard, underneath the aligned twin moons. Head nowhere else. Bring no light with you. And we shall finish what we started.”

I closed my eyes as he spun me again, my head dizzy. His words surrounded me until I could barely think. He would be waiting for us. Head nowhere else. Bring no light with you.

And then, suddenly, a flash of clarity cut through the fog clouding my mind. I looked up at the sky to see the moons, half of each overlapped with the other.

On the night that the twin moons aligned in the sky, the trapped queen’s magic would be at its strongest. She had told me that, the night we went to her grotto. It would be the time when her magic—her fire, her gift from the Sun, what Hyacinth feared most—was returned to her. It would be my chance to set things right, to release her from her underwater prison and restore her to the castle. Only she could stop Hyacinth, and only then would he leave us in peace.

Even now, the poison of Hyacinth’s promise tugged at me, protesting. Don’t you want to be remembered? You have fought so hard to earn this. I winced in the darkness, willing myself to steady. The someone else in me bared her teeth and yearned to push me fully into Hyacinth’s arms.

The part of me that kissed my brother’s forehead, that pulled him protectively to my side when he was afraid at night, urged me back.

When I returned to the kingdom, would I do what I needed and free the queen? Or would I bring my brother with me and present him to Hyacinth? The two sides of me stirred, clashing, and in this moment, I could not tell which would win.

“I will do it,” I found myself whispering. “I will meet you here.”

Hyacinth did not respond. When I opened my eyes again, the courtyard was gone, along with the castle and the thorns and the moat. I was standing in the box again with my parents, Woferl beside me, and I was clapping, along with everyone, as the librettist down on the stage curtsied for her adoring audience.

Already, Hyacinth’s hands on me felt like little more than the touch of a ghost. Woferl looked at me, his eyes curious and expectant. My heart hammered against my ribs. Perhaps Hyacinth had come to him too, coaxed him in the same way he coaxed me. I could feel the threads of his web tightening around us.

“Remember this lesson well, Nannerl,” my father said, leaning over to me. “Think of all that Psyche suffers, for the sake of her love, and how noble her loyalty makes her.”

I nodded but did not answer. Perhaps the fulfillment of her wishes was never worth what she had to sacrifice. Perhaps Psyche could have suffered for something other than love of a man. Perhaps, in another life, things could have been different for her.