The Goose Girl

by Shannon Hale

  Ani slipped through the fence and put out her hand. “Please, Tirean, step away.”

  She could not speak truly to this horse or any other, just to her own Falada, who had heard her speak his name at birth. Tirean was dumb to the words and shook her head at Ani’s hand. Ani reached for Tirean’s halter, and the mare nodded up and down, whipping the reins against the snow. Ani felt too tired to move. Her father was facedown, one arm sprawled, one tucked beneath his chest. She could not tell if he was dead or if he slept, only that he did not open his eyes. Ani turned to Falada on the other side of the fence.

  Falada, she needs to move.

  Falada circled back, began a quick canter, and jumped the fence. The mare started at his leap but did not move away from the king. Falada shook his mane and walked forward to touch noses with the mare. He nudged her with his cheek and breathed on her neck. Tirean seemed to sigh, a gust of warm breath that played in Falada’s mane. She stepped back carefully and huddled against a tree, her neck and mane shuddering, her head bent to the ground.

  Ani rushed to him and heard his breath rattle strangely in his chest. She bade the stable-hands move the king to the stable-master’s bed, where he slept for three days. The palace physicians could not wake him. The queen sat by his side, dry-eyed, sleepless. Calib, Napralina, Susena-Ofelienna, and the toddler Rianno-Hancery took turns holding his hand. Ani sat in a chair, gazing at his still face, and felt again like the little girl who had watched her aunt walk away into the purple horizon, her chest an abandoned snail shell.

  On the fourth day, the king woke briefly to smile up at Susena, who was holding his hand at the time. His eyes fluttered closed, then he turned his head to one side and did not breathe in again.

  The Great City was decked with white on the day of his burial. The royal family in white mourning dress walked like ghosts after the funeral wagon. Ani gripped her skirts in her fists and concentrated on the single note of the flute player and Rianno-Hancery’s high, sobbing cries twisting about one another in a painful harmony. She looked up where the White Stone Palace stretched its walls like low wings and raised the head of its single high tower to the winter blue—so like a swan, the bird of mourning. She took a shred of comfort in imagining that even the palace mourned. Her mother walked at the head of her remaining family, elegant and poised in her sorrow. Ani thought, These people watch me, their future queen. I need to seem strong. She straightened and stopped her tears, but next to her mother, she felt only half-formed.

  After the burial and ceremony, the queen stood before the tomb and spoke to the gathered people. She recalled the king’s diplomatic and military successes, the alliances he had formed, and the peace Kildenree had enjoyed since his coronation. To herself, Ani remembered other things, like his smile that pulled stronger on his right side than his left, the smell of the sheep oil he kept on his beard, and how these last years he had begun to smell less of parchment wax and more of stables. That made her smile.

  Then the queen said, “Do not fear that this sad day means more than the end of this king’s life. We will go on. I will continue as your queen and keeper of the realm. And in that distant day when you will carry my body to this place, my noble and capable son Calib-Loncris will be ready to take up the scepter and crown.”

  Ani looked up, her mouth slightly agape. Selia at her side pinched her arm.

  “Did you hear that, Crown Princess?”

  Ani shook her head slowly. “She made a mistake. She must be . . . she is confused in her sorrow, that’s all.”

  “Calib doesn’t look confused,” said Selia.

  Ani caught sight of her fifteen-year-old brother standing to her mother’s right. When had he grown up so much? she wondered. He was as tall as his very tall mother, and his face was smooth and controlled like hers.

  The queen finished and descended the tomb steps. Calib looked at Ani for the first time, hesitated, then stepped close to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. His forehead creased, and his eyes filled with the concern of an uncertain boy.

  “How long have you known she would do this?” said Ani.

  Calib shrugged. There was a trace of smugness in his refusal to smile, before he turned and walked stately after his mother.

  Selia prodded, but Ani refused to talk to her mother until after the six weeks of mourning white.

  “She is your mother, and she owes you an explanation.”

  Ani sighed. “First, she is the queen, and she owes me nothing. Besides, I don’t want to soil my father’s mourning with greedy or offended thoughts.” And also, Ani admitted to herself, she was afraid of the answer. Was her mother really capable of taking away everything Ani had worked and worried and studied and sweated for just on caprice? Ani took Selia’s hand and they leaned back on a courtyard bench, the sides of their heads touching.

  “After the six weeks, then. But I will not let you avoid it. She is fooling with your future.”

  “Thank you, Selia. I would feel so alone right now without you.”

  Selia patted her hand. Ani was thoughtful, watching the winter sky warm up into a bird’s-egg blue. The brilliant pain after her father’s death was subsiding into a mean ache, but Ani was not yet ready to let it go.

  “Selia, why do you worry so much about what my mother said?”

  It suddenly seemed to Ani that Selia’s passion on the subject went beyond the feelings of a concerned friend. But Selia did not answer. They sat in silence, the question hanging between them in the chilly afternoon like a frozen breath.

  At the end of six weeks, Ani stood outside the queen’s study, rallying her nerve. Selia waved encouragement from down the corridor and then went into her own apartment to await the outcome.

  “Enter,” said the queen.

  Ani took a deep breath. The queen was gifted with people-speaking, and Ani knew that arguing against her mother’s powers of persuasion was difficult—almost as difficult as explaining to Selia if she did not question her.

  “Mother, I ask pardon for intruding so soon after the mourning period, but I must ask you about your statement some weeks ago—”

  “Yes, yes, child, about Calib-Loncris. Sit down.” The queen was at her desk, looking over a parchment. She did not glance up. This was one of her tactics. Ani had been forceful and prepared, and now she was made to sit and wait at the whim of the queen.

  When the queen at last set down the parchment and met her daughter’s eyes, Ani was expecting an accusing stare and was surprised by the sorrow that weighed down her features. She could not tell if the sorrow was for her father or for her. A thought buzzed in Ani’s head: I do not know this woman at all. Her stomach turned uneasily.

  The queen met her eyes with a firm blue stare. “You remember, five years ago we received a visit from Prime Minister Odaccar of Bayern.” Ani nodded. It had been the year Falada was born. “It was not an idle visit. The prime minister does not journey for three months to have tea with the queen and king of Kildenree. There were issues of land.”

  The queen stood in front of the wall map and put her left hand, fingers spread, over the mass of Bavara Mountains and the great Forest that separated the two kingdoms. She looked at her hand a moment before speaking. “Bayern has long been a rich country, maintaining their wealth for centuries by launching successful wars.

  “The current sovereign is less belligerent than his ancestors. His own father and two brothers were killed in war when he was a boy, and he has ruled differently. But war was their business, and to replace that kind of income, the king spent years financing mining in their mountains. Successfully. They are following a rich deposit of gold that brings them, each year, closer to Kildenree. At this point, five years since Odaccar visited, they must be very near indeed. There have never been roads through these mountains, so official borders have never been made.”

  The queen looked up at Ani, her expression forcefully smooth. “Bayern’s king was becoming greedy. He claimed the bulk of the mountains for Bayern, leaving us a
thin range, weak protection from a country so much larger than ours. And stronger. Your father feared intrigue. As did I. Your father did nothing but fear. I acted.”

  Her mother’s magic with words was worming into Ani’s mind. Already she was thinking, Yes, fine, whatever you did is fine. She pricked herself again and warned herself not to fall into the role of complacent listener.

  The queen sat down and pressed her fingers against the corners of her eyes. “I have done what a queen should and what is best for Kildenree. The wide mountain range and the vastness of the Forest have kept us separated from our dangerous neighbors. In the past it would have taken an army four months at best to reach us by the Forest Road—the only road. Now, what is to defend us when the pass is cut? What will prevent that monstrous army from pouring into this valley? Nearly a generation of our men was killed in the civil war before your father and I were placed in power. Our armies are insufficient.”

  She seemed to be talking to herself now, and her tone was near pleading. Ani felt dread begin to prickle her skin. Her mother never pleaded.

  “You are the crown princess. If it had to be one of my children, it should have been Napralina, I know. She is the third child, the second daughter, just the prize such an arrangement would require. But she was so young, and you—you were different. After the trouble with your aunt, I worried that the people would never trust you, that the rumors of your being a beast-speaker had sunk too deep.”

  “What did you do, Mother?” said Ani.

  The queen ignored the question. Her voice twanged defensively. “A queen is never so secure that she can ignore what her people think of her, Anidori.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Did you not pass your sixteenth birthday during the mourning period?”

  Ani nodded.

  The queen took an audible breath and looked back at the map. “It was fortunate, truly, that Odaccar wished for peace as much as I. In private counsel, we arranged your marriage to the king’s first son. After your sixteenth birthday.”

  Ani stood, her chair scraping against the tile floor with a whine. The sound roused her, and she found she could argue back. “What? But, but you can’t.”

  “I do not want you to tell me that what I did is not fair. I know it is not fair.”

  “But I am the crown princess. I am supposed to be the next queen. The law says I am the next queen.”

  “Your motivation has always seemed to come more from duty than desire. I imagined you might even be relieved.”

  “Do not pretend that you are doing me a favor, Mother. You can’t just take away who I am. Whether or not you think I . . . I am good enough to be queen of Kildenree, that is what you have raised me to be, what I have worked at all my life.” Ani narrowed her eyes as realization burned her blood, and her voice softened with the pain of betrayal. “Is this why you kept me away from my siblings all these years? Not because you were training me to be queen, but rather protecting them from me because you knew you would be sending me away? Separation, elevation, delegation—it was all just a ruse.”

  “You will still be a queen, Anidori.”

  Ani shook her head. “You know it’s not the same. It will not be my crown. It will not be my home. I’ll be a stranger, the foreigner wife of their king.”

  Her mother glared. “What do you want? You want me to coddle you and feel sorry for you?”

  “I just—”

  "I will not have you questioning me!" The queen bolted upright. Instinctively, Ani covered her mouth with a trembling hand.

  “You are understandably angry, but that will not change the promises I have made, nor will it change what you will do.”

  Tears stung Ani’s eyes, and she slowly lowered her hand from her mouth. “Did Father know?”

  “No, he did not,” said the queen with some contempt. “He did not want to know. I told him I arranged the marriage for Napralina, that we would tell her when she turned fifteen, and by the time he found out it was you, it would be too late for him to change it. Had he known, he would have felt he needed to protect you. Protect a future queen! You should have been strong enough not to need protection.”

  “I was only a little girl then.”

  The queen shook her head. “You should never have been only a little girl, you should have always been a crown princess.”

  “All right, enough,” said Ani, too hurt to bear another word, and to her surprise her mother did not answer back. Her heartbeats shook her body, and she stood in silence awhile, trying to think of more things she would like to say. Battling her mother exhausted her, and hopelessness readily sucked away her anger.

  The map glared at her from the wall. The Great City Valley nestled in a curve of the Bavara Mountain Range. Farmlands radiated west and south like fingers from a palm. To the north and northeast, a mass of arrowheads represented the mountains. To the east and southeast, a tight group of crossed lines indicated the Forest. Past those great barriers was a white space and, in its center in script so perfectly tiny that it looked to have been written by a cricket’s claw, the word BAYERN.

  Her eyes followed the long road that began south of the Great City and moved east, curving northeast and then north to eventually form three-quarters of a circle. It wound for weeks through the Forest and ended in that white space, that unknown. She looked down at the lines on her palm. They were all straight, not curved and long like the line of the road.

  “Bayern,” said Ani.

  “I am sorry, Anidori,” said the queen.

  It was the first time she had heard her mother speak those words. They did not console. In them, she heard her mother saying, I am sorry I had to choose such for you, and I am sorry, for I know you will do what I chose. Ani saw herself clearly in that moment, as a face in darkness gains sudden dimensions in a flash of lightning—a young girl, a silly thing, a lapdog, a broken mare. She did as she was told. She rarely gave thought to her duties or spent deep hours or acted alone. She realized she would never have been capable of taking her mother’s place. That realization did not bring relief. Instead, the thought of the journey and her unknown future chilled her skin and pricked her stomach with dread.

  “I will go, but you already know that, don’t you?” Ani looked at the window where the bare branches of a cherry tree crossed out the view. “I’ll go.”

  Chapter 3

  Spring shrugged off its late snows and early pollen and settled into warmness, keen for summer. For Ani, the sudden dismissal from responsibilities was bewildering. She and Selia spent days wandering around the corridors, looking for something to do. Courtiers nodded to her but did not meet the eyes of the crown princess who had been deemed unworthy to rule. Those who did address her clipped her title to "Princess" and the "Crown" was passed on to her brother. All except for Selia. Stubbornly loyal, her lady-in-waiting still insisted on using her full and original title.

  Selia was, of course, wrathful to hear what the queen had done.

  “You cannot just allow her to take away what is rightfully yours.”

  “And I cannot take it back. I have no power here, Selia.”

  But quickly Selia seemed to see the futility in mourning the inevitable. At least she stopped berating Ani’s passivity and even began to show eagerness for the journey.

  “Just think of it, Crown Princess, you can start a new life with new possibilities. You will decide who you are.”

  It was little consolation at the moment, knowing that she was leaving everything she had ever known to marry a foreign prince whom no one seemed to know much about. And the betrayal still stung, as did the knowledge that had she been good enough, she would still be crown princess and Napralina would be looking forward to a long journey after her sixteenth birthday.

  Selia asked to spend much of her remaining period with her mother, and Ani suddenly found time to squander in the summering world. It was a relief to be with Falada, who had never cared if Ani had a "Crown" before her name. Calib was busy with his new duties and see
med to guiltily avoid Ani’s presence when he could, but Ani stole afternoons with Napralina and Susena and regretted having known them so little before. Days pushed by. The time to journey quickly arrived.

  On the morning of departure, Ani woke with a gasp. The total blackness disturbed her, and she sat up quickly, touching her eyes to see if they were still there. A little moonlight seeped through her curtains and comforted her. It was just early.

  Her nightmare still clung to her like the smell of smoke to cloth. Heralded by trumpets, serving boys had carried her into the banquet hall kneeling on a platter garnished with blue cabbage leaves and water lilies. She wore her white nightgown. Purple cherries dripping syrup had replaced her eyes. Her arms were strained backward as though she wished to fly away. They set her down before her mother, who lifted a carving knife and said, “It is your duty, daughter, for the good of the feast.”

  Remembering the dream made her laugh a little. “Don’t be so dramatic,” she told herself. “It’s not as though she is sending me off to be killed.” The dream, no doubt, had been inspired by the farewell banquet of last evening. The main course had been white swans roasted in their feathers.

  Ani opened her curtains and breathed in the warm night air. Cricket voices battled for more night, and she wished she could grant it to them. Her brown travel dress with wide skirts hung over a chair. When the sun rose, she would go.

  From her window she could not see the direction they would travel, so she sat facing north and contemplated the familiar view. No more crying, she told herself. It was not difficult. Her eyes were dry and sore. She concentrated on forming the images and sensations of her Kildenrean life into a body, and in her mind burying that body, peacefully, next to her father’s tomb in the soft summer earth.