by Shannon Hale
Selia is here, in the palace, in my dress.
“Come, you’re next,” said the chamber-mistress.
Selia is here, and that means she has killed them all—Talone, Adon, Dano, Radal, Ingras, all.
“Step quickly, girl, as there’s a line until tomorrow.”
Ani held her breath and entered the chamber. It was long and narrow, with a window in the ceiling that poured hot sunlight onto the pale marble floor. Ani wanted to squint at the brilliance. The image of Selia still burned in her eyes, like looking into darkness after staring at fire, and she walked forward blindly.
She knew there were guards in the corners and beside each bright column. She did not raise her eyes to them. Ungolad would be somewhere close to Selia. His men were in the city looking for her, and here she had come to the palace, a mouse to the cheese, to announce herself before them, inviting them to simply murder her like her companions. Ani stopped, afraid that if she continued moving, she would run away.
“Come closer,” said the king.
He was a wide man who seemed tall, even sitting. His hands, resting on the arms of the finely carved chair, were large and strong, and she imagined that if he had the need, he could still carry a sword to battle. He seemed tired but amused, perhaps by her reluctance to approach. Ani took a few more painful steps forward and performed her deepest curtsy, the one her tutor years ago had told her was for royalty only. No tutor could have prepared her for meeting a king no longer as Anidori-Kiladra of Kildenree, but as a forest girl in hand-me-down boy’s boots, charcoal-darkened eyebrows, and an imitated accent.
“What’s your petition?” said the chamber-mistress.
“I—don’t know,” she said, using the strong Forest accent. Stupid, stupid, she called herself. She could not reveal herself to the king now that she knew Selia had succeeded in penetrating the palace. What proof did she have? At her claim, the king would naturally call Selia to explain. Selia and all the guards could deny her story, and Ani would be imprisoned as an impostor or, perhaps worse, let go as a harmless nitwit and fall directly into Ungolad’s hands. There was no appeal. Ani was lost.
The king sighed. “You’re new to the city?”
“Yes, sire.”
“You have a place to stay?”
“No,” she admitted.
“What can you do?”
Thinking of finding Falada, Ani answered, hopefully, “I work with horses.”
The king gestured to a counselor who stood to his right.
“No need at present for a new hand in the stables, sire.” The counselor was a tall, thin-faced man who exuded awareness of his own importance. He looked over a parchment he had affixed to a thin board. “However, the goose boy finds himself alone and at odds with a gaggle of fifty.”
“Good,” said the king, and motioned for Ani to follow the counselor out of the room.
“Wait, uh, sire, I ask a boon. Could I speak with your prime minister for just a moment?”
The king gestured to the waiting counselor with impatience. “As you shall.”
Ani blinked, amazed that he granted her wish so readily, thanked him, and curtsied once again as a new petitioner was already waiting. When she straightened, there was a new expression on the king’s face. He seemed to see her for the first time, and the lines around his mouth deepened. She felt commanded to hold still for inspection while he looked at her, and she flushed from her neck to her hair.
“Good,” said the king again, and gave her a smile before the chamber-mistress called for his attention.
After the brightness of the receiving chamber, the dark wood walls and deep-toned rugs and tapestries of the corridor were a relief to her eyes. She was going to see the prime minister, and that, too, was a relief. She waited for the counselor to lead the way, but instead he called a pageboy, instructed him to take Ani to the workers’ west settlement, and then turned back to the king’s chamber.
“Wait, uh, sir? The king said I could speak with the prime minister.”
“I am he.”
“Not you. I mean, I met him once when I was younger.”
The prime minister sighed annoyance. “That was someone else, then. I am Thiaddag, the prime minister of Bayern, and have been for the last four years. So sorry I can’t abandon my important duties to reunite you with your old chum.”
He waved her off with the back of his hand and returned to the king.
“Well, come on, then,” said the boy.
Ani hesitated. Working with a goose boy was not part of her plan. But, then, her plan had been weak enough to crumble at the sight of Selia and a new prime minister. For now, she needed a way to stay in this city until she could rescue Falada.
“Yes, all right,” she said, following after the page.
When they emerged into the brightness of the courtyard, the pageboy stopped to stretch back his arms and puff out his chest, and he smiled at the blazing day. He reminded Ani of a robin in his red tunic, his hair unruly like loose feathers.
“My name’s Tatto. I’m the son of a captain of twenty. That’s why I’m a pageboy already, and me with only twelve years.”
“Oh,” said Ani. “Congratulations.”
He narrowed his eyes at her to see if he was catching her in a mocking tone. She shrugged, meaning she did not know if it was a good thing or not to be a pageboy at twelve. He shook his head and muttered, “Forest-born.”
He was talkative as they walked down the steep city streets, informing her of his many and complicated duties as page and all about the city. At length they reached the high city wall and began to travel beside it.
“On the other side of the wall are the pastures—cows, sheep, geese, and all. That’s where you’ll be working.”
“And where are the horses kept?” asked Ani.
“Oh, they’re behind the palace, on so much land you’d have to run to get past it all before breakfast.”
Behind the palace wall, Ani thought dismally. That would be a problem.
At last Tatto directed her to a long house two stories high and painted a yellow as lively as Ani’s tunic. The woman inside was thin and had dull eyes that did not seem to completely take in what they saw. When she spoke, her voice dragged out of her throat reluctantly, punctuated with pauses and moans. She introduced herself as Ideca, the mistress of workers in the west settlements, and sent Tatto off with a warning not to dawdle back as he had no doubt done on the way or his captain would return him to the grease pits of the kitchen. Tatto scowled at the hall-mistress for spoiling his image and rushed out the door.
Ideca looked Ani over. “You’re not to, mmm, get homesick for your Forest folks and run off at first frost.”
“No, I won’t,” said Ani.
“Don’t know why you went to the king instead of coming here direct. Suppose you think it’s a grand entrance, but don’t think it means you’ll be treated different. We all work. That’s what we do here, work.”
Ani nodded and hoped that was sufficient response.
Ideca pursed her lips. “Here’s where you’ll take your meals, morning and night, so you may as well start off with one now, mmm.” She plunked down a bowl of bean soup and a tall glass of water. Ani guzzled the glass of water immediately and then wished she had saved a few swallows to help ease down the cold soup.
Ideca took Ani upstairs to a haphazard wardrobe and gave her a spare skirt and tunic for washday, both pale orange like the rose on a peach, a long cut of birch with a bent end for herding her geese, and a hat with a low straw rim and a ribbon that tied under the chin, effectively hiding, Ani imagined, every strand of one’s hair.
“You’ll be living in the third house from the south, wall-side. The rest of the day’s free. Be back here for breakfast tomorrow early.” She sent Ani out and closed the door.
Opposite the mistress’s hall squatted a row of dwellings, each with one window and a separate door. Ani found the third house and entered. The house was no more than a room—a very small room. With her arms o
utstretched, she could nearly touch two walls at once. It shared its wooden sidewalls with neighbors and borrowed the west wall of the city for its back wall. It smelled of the city—refuse, smoke, food, and people and animals living too close together. The house was built right on the square cobblestone of the street, and she felt as though she still stood on the street, and any moment hawkers might come through her door or children playing at catch-the-fly might crawl through her window and jump over her bed to climb the rough stones of the back wall.
A small bed, a side table, and three iron hooks on one wall were the room’s only furnishings. Ani thought of her apartments in the White Stone Palace, just the first room that could hold fifteen of these, and she imagined the walls before her pushing back and brightening, white paint pouring over the bare walls like water thickened with light, tapestries of children and birds and hills of autumn unrolling themselves, carpets growing under her feet the way a stream floods its banks, the bed expanding into a mountain of pillows and blankets the way dough explodes into bread, books on the walls, cats at her feet, food on her table, a serving girl at the door saying, “May I help you dress, Crown Princess?”
Not crown princess. Not a princess anymore. The serving girl’s face was just a round stone in the wall. The mean dullness came crashing back into itself, hard and bleak and small. Ani sat on the bed and stared at her soft, uncallused hands.
After wandering down, around, to dead ends and back, past the acrid smell of cows’ kidneys on the street of meat shops and the dizzying emanations of the flowers in hundreds of baskets on the florists’ street, Ani finally found the market-square by following the noise. The quiet wagon people from last night had transformed into brazen city peddlers, waving goods at passersby, shouting from the seats of their wagons, standing and calling, “Apples! Herbs! Jars of preserves and nuts and cones! Blankets for the cold, the cold, buy blankets against the coming cold!”
Ani found her traveling companions just as animated, with half their bags empty and a crowd of purchasers fingering Gilsa’s intensely dyed yarns and tight knits. Even Finn spoke a word or two and waved a pullover in the air. She realized he was waving it at her, and she jogged to him, still feeling dazed by the noise and agitation of the square.
“Hello, Isi,” he greeted her, and she reminded herself that Isi was her name, for now. The group had sold a good lot of wares, though nearly half still remained and they would have to stay on for the rest of marketweek.
“It’ll be better next month,” said the girl with the red scarf, “when the weather’s cooling and all the world’s afraid of winter.”
“Finn, I’ve been given work here.” She tried to whisper but nearly yelled to be heard above the din. “I’m to tend the king’s geese.” She smiled, for though it was simple labor, it sounded noble in her ears just then, as though she heard Tatto’s satisfied voice swaggering the phrase.
“Good work,” said Finn.
“I just wanted to tell you that, so you wouldn’t wonder where I’d gone.”
He patted her shoulder, then looked at her quizzically. He touched his eyebrow and smiled at her with the energy of a good, secret joke. She wondered what state they were in, hoping that the charcoal had not smeared.
“Well, I should go. Thanks for your kindness.” She turned to leave, then quickly returned and spoke near his ear.
“Finn, should anyone discover you know me, and come to you or your mother, pretending to be my friend, asking where I am, don’t tell them. Please.” She smiled painfully. “You two are the only friends I have in this kingdom.”
He nodded. “I saved you a bit of lunch.” He pulled an apple from the wagon, fat and green, smelling like the sharp, wet grasses of the forest streams. “Luck,” he said, gave her the apple, and returned to his selling.
Ani threaded her way through the stands, carts and wagons, merchants, sellers from outside the city, and city dwellers come out to make a coin. There was a small crowd gathered around a man who juggled red balls. One of the balls turned into a dove, and it flew through the circle. Ani watched, openmouthed.
“Tricks.”
A woman in a green headscarf waved a finger at Ani. She was seated on a blanket so covered by roots, clusters of berries, and dried bunches of leaves that she could not have moved.
“It’s all tricks.” The woman gestured to the juggler. “Not magic.”
“Oh, of course,” said Ani. The woman squinted at her and coughed or, perhaps, laughed.
“You’ve got something in you, don’t you, now?”
Ani creased her brow.
“Words, young thing. In you. More than you think, I think.”
“Is it magic, what I have?”
“Do you know what you have?”
Ani shrugged.
“I also think you want something here.” She swept a dirty hand over her gathered wares.
“Yes, actually, thornroot,” said Ani, asking for a plant she had learned about in her root-gathering days at Gilsa’s. “But I don’t have a coin.”
The woman sniffed. “For the apple.” She produced from a slightly moldy mound a pinkie finger-size root. “All I’ve got. Not in demand.”
They exchanged goods, and before Ani could question her again, the woman shooed her away.
Ani fought her way through the mayhem to the city wall and then followed the wall west, her left hand running along the stones. She had not left the market noise far behind when she caught a glimpse of long objects hanging from the wall up ahead. She blinked and tried to make them out. Before she could see them clearly, she smelled them.
The corpses emanated death under the fierce gaze of the sun. It was the biting odor of sour meat and fresh blood, and it touched the back of her throat like a finger. Her body trembled, wishing to turn inside out, and she quickly stumbled past. She stopped a few paces later. A man leaned against the wall, chewing on a sausage biscuit and staring at what hanged on the wall.
“Excuse me, sir,” she said.
The man spat out a tough bit of meat and looked down at her. “I’m not a sir, Forest girl, I’m Arnout.”
“Arnout, can you tell me why those, those bodies are up there?”
He shrugged. “Criminals. Probably killed somebody or stole animals or took a girl. The bad things. Not cowardice, though. Commit cowardice in the king’s army and you get buried in mud, you get hidden. That’s tradition.” He smiled through a mouthful of chewed biscuit and patted her head. “City’s not much like your little Forest, eh? You’ll get used to it.”
Ani walked away and did not look back. She realized that she did not know if criminals were killed in Kildenree. Perhaps they were. Perhaps they were hidden from her, as much of the world had been. Perhaps her mother had thought she was too weak to know the world.
A long walk later, Ani reached the workers’ settlements. She cracked open Ideca’s door to ask for a little vinegar, which she received in a loaned cup after a moaned complaint and a mild scolding.
Ani entered the third house in the row, and to avoid the gloom of gray wood and cramped space, she started right to work. The brown thornroot had been a find in that marketplace, dim and forgettable among the berries, roots, and organs used for the bright colors the Bayern sought.
With a loose rock, she cut dark, juicy strips into a hollow in a floor stone, then bruised them in drops of vinegar. Using a little bundle of grass as a brush, she carefully covered the fair hairs of her eyebrows in the dye. Coloring her locks would take more thornroot than she imagined could be found in the entire marketplace, besides the consequence of coloring her hands to her wrists in the process. This would have to do.
She wiped off the dried dye with the underside of her skirt and curled up in bed. Even in her sleep she was aware of the wood slats pressing through the thin mattress like bruises on her back.
Chapter 8
When dawn creaked open its bright eye, Ani could hear both her neighbors stirring, wooden bed frames whining the truth of their age, and boots s
craping across stone. She took her yellow tunic and blue skirt from the hook instead of the new rose orange, preferring familiarity to novelty on that morning. She wrapped her hair above her head in a braid and held it in place with her hat. She hoped no one would question why she wore a shade hat even though dawn was a new idea and the sun barely slipped through cracks between buildings to touch cobblestones. She tied the ribbon in a knot beneath her chin and stuffed loose hairs back into its tightness. Armed with her crook, Ani left her little room and braved Mistress Ideca’s breakfast tables.
Ani opened the door to the smell of warm food mixed with the odor of cowsheds, breakfast bread, and bodies that spent too much time with animals and too little time in a bath. Ani wondered if she could eat through that smell, though the nearly three dozen workers at the table benches were eating as though half starving.
They were young, some boys nearly as young as Tatto, some girls older than Ani, all with hair shades maple-bark brown to mud black. The hall trembled with the sounds of chatter, metal spoons on ceramic dishes, the slamming of the kitchen door as Ideca’s girls entered with full platters and left with dirty plates, and friends called to friends at other tables. Ani noticed that none of the other girls had their hats on. She fingered her brim nervously and looked for a place to sit and keep to herself.
It was not long before she was noticed.
“Conrad, there’s your girl,” someone yelled.
“There’s the new one.”
“Go on, Conrad, give her a kiss,” said a boy. He pushed a boy in an orange cap off the end of the bench and onto the floor, and that boy promptly pulled himself to his feet and grabbed a handful of cooked eggs. Before his gooey hand reached the offending boy’s face, Ideca had leaped forward, seizing his wrist with one hand and his hat and a handful of hair with the other.