“The queen,” I replied, “the one who truly belongs here.”

He took a step back. A stricken look came onto his face, replaced quickly by anger. In it, I saw a thousand realizations—who I’d brought before him, who had freed her, what she wanted.

The queen stared back at him with an unflinching expression. A small smile tilted up the edges of her lips. She was taller now, her bearing more regal. I wondered how I’d ever mistaken her for anything other than a queen.

“I thought we had a bargain,” Hyacinth said to me. There was real terror in his eyes now. “Bring your brother to me, when the time has come, so that he may take his place in the kingdom. You betrayed me.”

“My brother is on his deathbed,” I replied, finding my strength, “because of you. If I’d brought him here today, you would keep him here eternally, so that he will disappear from my world. You would do the same with me.”

“I am your guardian, Nannerl, not your demise.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Everyone always thinks they are protecting me.”

His mouth twisted into a grimace. His faeries flitted wildly, unsettled and angry. He did not like the look of understanding on my face. “Don’t you want your brother gone? Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?”

Once, perhaps, when I didn’t understand myself, I’d wanted it.

The queen stirred then, and Hyacinth backed uneasily away from her. She fixed her intense gaze on him and refused to let him look away. “The last time I saw you, you came to me with your glowing eyes and a charming smile on your face,” she said. “You led me away from my children, and into a cavern where you imprisoned me.”

Hyacinth growled, a low rumble that began in his chest and rose through his throat. “Stupid queen,” he said, then glanced at me. “Stupid girl. All your life, you wanted nothing more than to stand tall next to your brother. Now you will be reduced to nothing but a brief mention in history. Perhaps not even that. And for what, my darling? Because you’re afraid to harm your brother?”

I kept my face resolute. “Because I will not make a bargain with a liar. There are too many lies in my life.”

His eyes slid anxiously to the queen again. Suddenly, with his persuasion taken away from him, he seemed weaker, his figure less menacing. The queen stood so tall that I couldn’t even remember how she’d looked in the cave. Her skin began to glow with gold. Every line of her looked regal, unflinching and unafraid, finally ready to face the one who had brought her so much misery. The warmth from her wrapped around me in an embrace.

“You are in a castle where you don’t belong,” the queen said to Hyacinth. As she spoke, the castle stirred and sighed beneath its ivy-choked walls and soot-stained paths, as if remembering its mistress’s voice. “Go back to the woods and torment us no more.”

Hyacinth sneered at her, but already the castle was changing, revitalized by the magic of her warm presence, and as Hyacinth stood there, the thorns and ivy that had started to choke the courtyard walls began to crumple away. I heard the echo of laughter from long ago, the merry voices of villagers who had once strolled this place.

Hyacinth’s smile reappeared. To my horror, his eyes were shifting . . . molding into something that looked surprisingly like my own eyes. “Little noble lady,” he taunted. “So abruptly changed. But it is too late for you. You have made your choice, and you have decided to be forgotten.”

This was a final lie. It was not too late yet.

Beside me, the queen lifted her glowing hands. Hyacinth shrank back in terror. His faeries darted away in a uniform wave.

“You’re afraid of the light,” I said to him. “Of warmth. Fire. Life.”

“You will not do it,” he said. His voice had turned into a whimper now as he looked between the queen and me. “You know I am your only chance to fulfill your wish. We have always helped each other, Fräulein. If you turn away from me now, there is no coming back.”

“I’ve had enough of your temptations,” I replied. “You are not the guardian of my destiny. I have already found my own way. You will not take my brother, and you will not steal me away to die.”

“Everyone dies,” Hyacinth said. He laughed, a high, nervous sound. “But not everyone, my darling, will be remembered.”

I thought of what I’d written, the sonatas published under my brother’s name. I thought of our oratorio, the measures of my own that I had kept. I thought of my brother’s wide, admiring eyes, the way he would imitate my style, my composition, my music. I thought of his last words to me, his small voice, his hand in mine. It was my wish, in a form I could only now recognize.

All I’ve ever wanted was to be like you.

Perhaps I would never be remembered in the same way as my brother. Perhaps, in the world’s eyes, I would never be what I wanted to be. Perhaps the only one who would ever hold me in his heart would be Woferl. But when I was gone, my work would survive, immortalized on paper, embedded in my brother’s mind. Locked away inside me, carried on through him. No one could take that piece of my soul away.

“What you offer me,” I replied, “I have already achieved.”

Hyacinth lunged toward me. The queen stepped forward, her arms outstretched, to protect me. The glow of her hands flashed a brilliant golden light, as bright as the Sun itself—and all at once, the entire castle seemed drenched in heat. Fire engulfed the dark grass near my feet, eating it away in great gulps. The queen lifted her arms to the sky, and the flames before us surged at her beckoning.

Hyacinth shrieked in anger and fear. Fire raced in a ring around me and swallowed the crooked black trees, the winding path, the vines and ivy and leaves, the clusters of mushrooms. It devoured the faeries in its path, the ivy staining the walls, the soot-charred stones. It devoured the ghosts of the past and the weight of the air. It fed on the dead silence of the castle, filling it instead with the roar of flames.

Hyacinth tried to run. He leapt over one column of fire, then another. For a moment, I thought that perhaps we would not be able to trap him at all, that he would end up escaping still into the woods, until the next time a poor fool crossed his path and he decided to use their lives for his pleasure.

Then the flames caught his arm. Hyacinth yelped, dancing in agonized fury amidst the flames and burning trees. His skin melted in the heat. His screams grew higher and higher. I watched as the flames ate away at his figure until he was no longer a tall, foreboding figure, not even the shy and mischievous boy I’d first seen so long ago, his eyes large with fear and his wide mouth twisted into a smile. He danced as he died, his body a column of fire raging in unison with everything around him.

Fräulein! he called to me as he went. Help me!

And even now, in spite of everything, I could feel the pull of his presence against my heart. But the queen and I watched in silence, until that pull weakened and weakened into nothing.