The Goose Girl

by Shannon Hale

  One new autumn morning, over a week after Ani had arrived in the city, they found one of Conrad’s strays. Ani saw him first, just a white mark beside the pond. She thought it might be a washed-out bit of wood pushed ashore by the night water, or a forgotten shirt, though she had yet to see a Bayern wear plain white. Ani was so absorbed with the distant figure that she was not prepared to defend herself against a particularly aggressive gander that, after passing through the pasture gate, took a moment to extend his thin neck and nip her on the rear.

  “Stop it. Oh, just stop it, all of you.” Ani rubbed the spot with the heel of her hand, and Conrad laughed.

  “You’ve got a few friendly goose pals, I guess,” he said.

  Ani glowered. “Yes, I guess.”

  The lone gander did not move when the gaggle arrived at the water’s edge. He squeaked a greeting, and some geese gathered around him, chattering over one another and prodding his side with their beaks.

  “One of the three,” said Conrad. “He’s been gone two weeks.”

  The gander raised his head at Conrad but seemed too tired to stand. Several feathers hung loose, giving the appearance of a poorly stuffed pillow. Ani stepped forward, intending to check him for bites or scratches. A large goose turned her back on the gander and hissed at Ani, the top of her beak raised threateningly, her pink tongue trembling. Ani’s bruises throbbed at the sound.

  “All right,” she said, “I’ll stay away. Take care of your own, because I’ve no more good skin to give over to another bruise.”

  Ani sat under her tree and gazed up at the palace. The warm morning lulled her, and she rested her head against the tree and tried to imagine how to free Falada from the palace stables and, after that, how to get home again.

  A rumble of hoofbeats broke her daydream apart. A group of horsemen outfitted for hunting cantered down the goose pasture. Several veered their horses to pass right through the middle of the flock and sent the geese flurrying with a cacophonous chorus of honks and a beating of wings to strike speed into their flat feet. Ani lowered her head and peered at the horsemen from under her hat brim, wary of any familiar faces or light-colored hair. There was no need. The nobles on their grand horses never turned an idle eye on the goose girl. They leaped their mounts across the goose pasture stream and entered the woods on the other side. None of their horses was white.

  The beech shadow had moved, and the sun was heating Ani’s cheeks. She stepped into its northern shadow. There was the gander, still in his same spot, though alone now, the others having left him when fleeing the hooves. He raised his head at her with a little more energy and opened his beak slightly. Ani was not sure if it was meant to be a hiss.

  The gander slowly stood and took an awkward step. He stopped. He leaned his body forward and let the momentum pull him into a few sloppy strides.

  “Are you using your last, dying strength to attack me?” she said. “Now, that would be silly.”

  The gander still stumbled forward and, gaining her folded leg, sat down hard by it, his body close up against her ankle. Ani held very still.

  “Did you have a long journey?” She pulled up a handful of grass that was turning to seed and held it near his head. He looked at it for a moment, then lowered his beak and nibbled it out of her palm. It tickled, and Ani concentrated on not twitching her hand.

  “Oh, I see, you want to be babied. Mmm. Seeing as how I’m not doing anything else, I’ll oblige. But this means I’ve the right to name you, and your name’ll be Jok, after that old tale of the wanderer that always returns.”

  He nibbled again but made no noises. She thought she could hear his labored breathing.

  “Poor gosling. It hurts to be lost. And worse to be home with no kind of homecoming. You’re my good-luck bird, Jok. I’ll be lucky if I can do as well as you when all this’s done, just a bit out of breath, a bit bruised and scratched, a bit wiser and sadder for it all.”

  He finished the last blade of grass from her palm, and when she did not immediately pull up another handful, Jok looked at her and gave a gentle honk. She had torn another fistful of grass and let him pick each blade from her palm before she realized that she had understood. He had asked for more.

  That evening, Ani carried Jok home under her arm. After they locked the rest of the geese in their pen, Ani examined the animal and found three claw marks across his thigh, one of them deep, the pink flesh swollen around the wound.

  “I’m taking him to Ideca to see about a salve.”

  “However you want,” said Conrad.

  Ideca had a dark and pungent balm, “good enough for anybody’s scratch, goose, cow, or girl,” and Ani held Jok steady while Ideca worked it under the feathers into the deepest cut. Her languid eyes brightened a little while she handled the animal.

  “This should be Conrad helping you. The boy can’t be coerced into lifting a finger after his geese are penned. I shouldn’t say what I think around you, mmm, since you goose-keepers are no doubt tighter than knots already.”

  “He doesn’t talk much,” said Ani.

  “He’s probably shy of you.” Ideca looked her over with similar attention that she gave the goose. “You’re a pretty one. I guess you know that, since you wear that hat dawn to dusk, protecting your skin even from the weak light of the moon. Some of this Forest lot got plans to keep them in the city. Guess yours is the hope you’ll marry a nobleman, mmm?”

  Ani took Jok to her room, her face still burning from Ideca’s comments.

  Jok slept that night on Ani’s bed between her feet. In the morning she jabbered at him and he jabbered back, and some of it made sense. She fed him brown bread from the breakfast table. Razo joshed that the goose girl had found her mate and asked Conrad if he had his eye on a particular goose, for which Razo got a slap upside the head. The familiarity of the exchange gave Ani a smile. She brought Jok to Ideca for more salve that night, and the next, and his cut healed. Soon, Ani admitted to herself that she let the goose sleep on her bed not for his own sake, but for the comfort the creature gave her against the dark dream of running.

  Ani woke to Jok squawking in her ear that the sun had risen and it was time to eat. She imitated the sound to him, and he repeated it again in their practiced back-and-forth game of noises. Finally she answered him, tentatively, with what she thought was an affirmation, that yes, it was time for eating. Ani guessed she understood more than what she could even try to say, and when Jok gave no response, she groaned to herself. The goose made a deep noise, which Ani thought might be a mock of her own, and they groaned nonsensically to each other on the way to breakfast.

  Herding the geese down the avenue that morning proved to be a task fit for a battalion of goose girls. There was more traffic than usual. A gaggle of children playing chase mixed themselves into the gaggle of geese, and Ani left her post at the head to round up strays. She had been trying words on the geese and had begun to see them respond. At least, they were less inclined to bite her legs when she tried to speak their tongue.

  Ani clucked and honked at the scattered geese, and Conrad rolled his eyes.

  “Thinks she’s a goose,” he said.

  “At least it works,” she said.

  Conrad made mock goose noises back at her until he saw something up ahead that quieted him. His expression changed, suggesting eagerness, and Ani peered ahead to see what he saw.

  Two street cats, crouching, tails twitching, one perched on the rim of a wagon, the other underneath, muscles poised and eyes fixed on the nearest goose. And Ani was too far away to draw back the lead geese with her crook.

  She made a noise she had heard them use before, a warning word she thought meant "dog.” The geese, quick as instinct, turned their backs and huddled together, and the ganders, with strong wings raised, heads low to the ground, twenty throats hissing as one, rushed the beasts. The cats drew in their claws, hissed once in return, and loped away into the dirty streets.

  Ani and Conrad flocked the geese safely through the arch and do
wn the slope. Once the lead goose passed through the archway, Ani turned to Conrad with anger that she still felt.

  “You could’ve warned,” said Ani. “You wanted to see me fail, sacrifice a goose to see me be an imbecile.”

  “If you’re so much better at goose-keeping, then go to.” Conrad marched away, crossed the stream, and spent the day on the far side, out of sight.

  Later that same day, Ani saw a single horseman. When he rode through the arch, Ani glanced up, and then, seeing that his horse was a bay, she returned her attention to the pair of geese that had approached Jok. She had to concentrate, for geese talked over one another like old men who had lost their hearing, and while they did not employ as much movement as swans did in their language, there were still neck bobbings and beak liftings and tail waggings to add to the meanings . Ani guessed they were asking Jok about his journey and he was informing them of the many adventures of a rogue goose.

  After a few moments, she remembered the horseman and glanced up to the gate, but she was startled to see that he had disappeared. He was not on the far ends of the goose pasture by either of the lines of hedges, and she would have noticed had he ridden past her and crossed the stream.

  The inarticulate thumping of hooves roused her to her feet, and Jok from her lap, honking resentfully. The man had jumped his horse over the hedges to the north and was racing across her field. He wrenched the reins, but the horse continued to run. The man pulled harder, and the horse bucked at the tension, his back arched, his neck bent low. The horse heaved and twisted and dumped the rider from the saddle. The horse bucked again for good measure, then trotted to a halt.

  The man leaped up, grabbed the reins, and swung himself into the saddle. The bay seemed to consider bucking again but instead stood still, his body heavy, unmovable, his legs stiff. Ani recognized the stance. She had seen Falada act in like manner when a stable-hand had tried to ride him. Her breath escaped quickly through her lips in a quiet laugh.

  “Mule,” said the man. He swung himself off the unyielding horse. The moment his boot touched soil, the animal was wild again, rearing up on his mighty back legs, swinging his head like a banner in strong wind, ripping the reins from the man’s hands. The horse knocked him aside with a sudden lurch and raced across the pasture, stopping before the line of hedges on the south side. The man tore a clump of grass and threw it back at the ground.

  Ani jogged up the slope toward the bay. “Stay,” she said to the man as she passed, her hand out, like an order given to a dog. He noticed her for the first time, and his face flushed.

  “Oh, um, lady, I don’t recommend whatever it is you have in mind.”

  She ignored him. The bay paced near the hedges, his ears pinned back to his neck, his steps stiff and long. When she neared, his outer ear opened to her and the muscles of his neck flinched at the new annoyance.

  Ani advanced, her shoulders straight, her head high, her eyes locked on to his.

  "Look at me,” she said quietly. “Some riders are beneath you, aren’t they? I want to be your equal. I want to meet you.”

  The horse pranced. He held his tail high and pounded a half circle around her, but to the side was the wall, to the back was the hedge, and on the far side sat the irritating rider. The bay seemed to find Ani more interesting and stopped near her. She smiled. He had that look Falada sometimes wore, one ear stiff and one relaxed, his back leg crooked as though he wanted her to think he did not care a thimbleful of oats about her. Ani turned her back and looked down, playing at the same game.

  It was not long before she heard slow thuds behind her and felt a warm, clover-sticky huff of breath on her neck.

  She turned slowly and into a rather heavy exhale that made her blink, first from the powerful smell and then again for the reminder of Falada, and she found her eyes were too wet to see straight until she could blink them dry. She put the flat of her hand on the bay’s forehead and rubbed it. He rested his nose in her other hand and sniffed ponderously.

  “Hello there, horse friend,” she said. “Can you smell your speech on me? I knew the speech of one horse. Though I can’t hear your thoughts, your touch is nearly as comforting. It’s kind of you to let me touch you. It’s good to be reminded how much I miss him.” She spoke to him soothingly as she rubbed his neck and sides and legs, all down his right side, and then passed under his neck and rubbed his left side.

  He stiffened as she approached his mounting side, so she made nickering noises, soothing things mares murmured to their foals. The bay responded with deep sounds from his throat that were not words, akin to hums and laughter, noises that carried emotion or the basis of connection.

  She continued to stroke him until her hands reached his shoulder where the knotted reins hung over one side. Holding the ends of the reins, Ani placed a boot in a stirrup and hopped onto his back. The horse rearranged his stance, but his muscles did not freeze up. Ani’s skirt slid up as she mounted, but it was wide and dropped over her boot tops once arranged. She felt comfortable on a horse again, like finding a favorite childhood spot in the garden. She looked at her flock, busy and peaceful around the pond a ways down the slope, and across the stream where the trees were thicker she thought she could make out Conrad’s orange cap.

  “Very nice,” said the rider. He had approached and was watching with an unclear expression.

  She turned away and let her heels dig in. The bay sprang into a canter.

  The pasture was a violent green, smoothed of shadows and imperfections by sheer speed, just one color united. The gray of the wall was constant to her right, the shimmer of the stream to her left, and she let her heart be lifted by the wind that seemed so thick as to blow through her body and make her light as itself. The horse felt glad to run, and the pressure from her legs bade him go faster, and faster. The wind fought her hat brim and filled up her ears, speaking words that she thought she could almost hear, and she rode faster, wanting to get closer to the source, to get inside the wind and see what it saw. They neared the northern hedge, and Ani crouched low to the horse’s neck and gripped his sides with her knees, feeling herself become part of the thundering of hoofbeats, and then the tremendous escape from earth as he leaped. Her body lifted skyward and free.

  Ani rode a short ways before, prodded by guilt, she turned the bay around and jumped the hedge again, to find the man running toward her. The wind died as the horse slowed, and she felt its words leave her skin unspoken. She stopped by the man’s side and dismounted.

  “What do you mean, riding away on my horse?” His breath came a little quicker from the run. “You can’t... can’t just do that.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have mounted him without your permission. I got carried away.” But she did not feel sorry. She felt herself grinning.

  The man straightened, trying to be serious in spite of her grin. “Yes, you shouldn’t, I mean, he’s my horse.”

  “That aside, I really couldn’t have been expected to stand by and watch without lending a hand. It wasn’t hard to see the mount didn’t trust the rider.”

  The man opened his mouth and tried to laugh, but he just shook his head. “I could’ve stayed at the grounds if I’d wanted this kind of pointed abuse. I know I’m not an expert horse breaker, but I’m doing what any stable-master would do.”

  I should stop harassing him, she thought, but her own boldness was intoxicating, and she continued.

  “Oh, come now, surely you can feel how uneasy he is when you mount. You can see him roll back his eyes as though he’d like to be everywhere he can see but here with you. He’s an untrained, wild animal, and half-crazy with fright that you’re leading him to predators and all kinds of uncomfortable situations. You’ve got to get him to commit to you before you can gallop over hedges and up and down strange pastures.”

  “Look now, you’ve overstepped yourself here, and I find this a bit of an uncomfortable situation myself and am itching to roll my own eyes, if you’d know.”

  “I gues
s I have overstepped myself, and you’ve every right to be angry at me, if you’re angry, of which I’m not entirely certain, since you seem to be laughing at the same time, but you don’t need to pretend to be innocent here. I mean, if you’re as good a horse breaker as any, why did you seek out the seeming privacy of the goose pasture instead of working him on the palace grounds? You live at the palace, don’t you?”

  The man lifted his brows at her and nodded. He’s surprised I know that, thought Ani, though any fool can see the horse wears the palace insignia on his saddle blanket. She could see he was not a nobleman’s son, lacking the softness and self-assurance she remembered from her boy cousins, so the horse was probably not his. He had work-hardened hands that were broad and strong and shoulders fit for lifting. Ani decided that most likely he was a palace guard or watchman.

  The man looked at the dirt on his boot tip. The pasture was suddenly quiet, and she noticed the distance-muted calls of Jok, who said, Come back, come back.

  She looked closer at the man. He was older than she, though not by many years. He had thick black hair, cut just longer than his shoulders, that he tied back in a low pony’s tail, and the kind of prominent jaw and chin that would stay prominent for all his life. His shoulders were broad, and it was not just a trick of a well-cut tunic, as his was a thin cotton, roughly made. She was thinking of how she had ordered him and insulted him and mounted his horse to ride down the pasture like a crazed thief. The anonymity of her goose girl costume and name gave leash to a freedom that she had never dared exhibit when she had been the crown princess shivering in her mother’s shadow. Her throat felt dry. She coughed, and realized that she was mortified.