by Shannon Hale
After a few minutes, the attendant signaled to the chamber-mistress then escorted Ani through the side entrance to stand under the noon roof window before the king.
“Not an assassin, I hope.” There was tired humor in his voice.
“No, sire, a supplicant who lost her way,” said the attendant, “and was found on the royal equine grounds, putting her hands to tame the princess’s demented stallion.”
At the word demented, Ani winced.
“Leave,” said the king and the attendant withdrew. Ani raised her head and looked him in the face, and his countenance softened. He was not a handsome man, though the thoughts of good looks of youth remained like a reflection of a face on glass. She thought he might be as gentle as her own father with children, but more strict. He motioned for her to step forward.
“Ah, the new goose girl,” he said. “With the comely curtsy. Where’s that curtsy now?”
“It was difficult, sire, with one arm held at my back.” Ani was not certain she had hidden the irritation and fear from her voice, but she gave a low curtsy. The king smiled.
“Hmm, now, when last you were here, you requested a post in the stables, and were denied, and now you’re found there—accidentally. Was it accidentally, my girl?”
“No, sire, I never claimed it was.”
“Ah.” He had seemed bored when she first saw him addressing complaints, and now he leaned forward with an expression that was almost amused.
“I’m brimful of guesses,” he said, “but, for time’s sake, why don’t you report your reason, straight and simple.”
“I . . . I wanted to see the princess’s horse, and when I saw him I was sorry, for he was terrorized in the spirit, and I climbed the fence because I was confident I could help him.”
“And did you help him?”
“No,” said Ani. She thought of Falada’s eye, dim as a cow’s, looking at her before his hoof struck. “I think, I think he’s beyond the place where human and animal share language.”
Then she forgot the image of the tormented horse and became aware of the king’s critical gaze.
“Sire,” said the chamber-mistress, warning him of time and of a queue that waited.
“Yes, well, young goose girl, you’ll explain to me one day what precisely that means. As for now, there must be a damage of some kind for the trespass, or by next week’s end we might have a city of citizens strolling the palace grounds to sightsee mad horses and trample the royal rosebushes. Do you support a family in the forest?”
“No.” My family’s in Kildenree, she wanted to say. I’m Anidori-Kiladra, I’m the princess. But her stomach clenched with dread and warning. Not now. It would not be wise. He would not believe.
“Then, the month’s salary will do. Do you carry it with you?”
The workers had been paid the night before marketday. She took from her apron pocket the thin, gold coin stamped off-center with a running horse and handed it to the king.
“One steed? That’s all? Well, we can’t deprive you of that entire trivial sum. Counselor! Can you make change?”
A counselor approached, pouring coins from a pouch into his palm.
“It’s a sad state when the king doesn’t own a copper.” The king plucked a silver and a copper coin from the counselor’s hand and gave them to Ani. “There you are. No complaints, no return to the stables, and off you go.”
“Sire,” said Ani. She stood awkwardly a moment, waiting for his attention to return to her. “What’s to become of the horse, the princess’s horse gone wild?”
“I don’t know.” He spoke with sudden severity, and her head throbbed anew with the bruise Falada had given. “The king doesn’t concern himself with other persons’ horses. Dismissed.”
Ani walked out of the palace gates and beyond sight of the guards before she stopped and sighed that she was free. She rested her shoulder against a wall and pressed her bruised cheek to the cold stones. Touch made the spot pound with her pulse as though Falada hit her again and again.
Falada had turned mad.
The realization was as real as the pain. Perhaps the cause was what he had seen in the Forest. Or after he had been used to present the false princess to Bayern, and Selia no longer had use of him, perhaps then she or Ungolad had done—something. Ani winced away from the thought. She decided she wanted to feel the pain in her head, so she left the cool wall and walked. The general movement of the people pulled her down a wide avenue, and she did not slow until she reached the first ring of the market.
The market-square was an enormous circle of noise and people that enveloped the central square and several streets beyond. She walked carefully through the fringed outer loop, a circle of beggars who sat on ragged blankets and displayed maimed limbs and sickly children like wares for sale. Some shook tin cups of coins, a noise like babies’ rattles.
The next ring of the market belonged to the performers, groups of children with their arms around shoulders singing lays of heroes or tavern songs, and men strumming lap harps and playing wood flutes, and women in tight trousers (that made Ani blush and look away) who stood on their head and on others’ shoulders, and the magicians with their juggling balls and dancing wood-men.
The third loop was formed by the food vendors with their steaming pockets full of buns and women with baskets on their heads, and some, the richer ones, with wooden carts and an extra man to watch for food pinchers. Pigeons pecked at the ground and croaked warnings to each other—My bread, my rind, my plum, stay away, stay away. Ani saw a chunk of pork fall to the ground and was tempted to coo back at them, My meat, stay away. She had not yet broken her fast. Regretfully, she breathed in the smell of the sausage breads, hot cabbage salads, and syrup apples and kept walking.
And then she saw in the inner ring, surrounded by the sellers of goods, a platform where two men swung a little on their neck ropes. A man passed her waving muttonchops, and the smell twisted her stomach. She held her breath and hurried on.
Ani found Finn’s group near the center of the square with their backs to the execution. She turned her back as well and came up behind them. There was an appreciable crowd bartering for Gilsa’s knitted goods and the other forest wares. The day had dawned with a real autumn chill, and the people’s minds turned to winter and what the Forest dwellers knew of the cold. No one seemed to mind that the goods were a bit damp from yesterday’s rainstorm, and Ani imagined Finn and his neighbors camped in the drizzle around a flooded fire pit and thought to be grateful for her thin metal roof.
Finn came to her immediately. His mien betrayed concern, and she realized that it was mirroring her own.
“I’m in trouble.” She pulled him apart from the others and spoke in her natural, unused voice, dropping the pretense of accent. “I need to tell someone that, and I’m so confused, and there is nothing to be done, except listen and wait, and be careful.”
The boy patted her shoulder.
“They killed my friend, or near enough.” She bit her lip, hard, to keep from crying. “They want to kill me. I can’t go home, and I am so tired of being afraid.”
Ani sobbed once and put her head on Finn’s shoulder, letting herself be held a moment, be told it was all right, and imagine what it would be like to be safe and known and cared for. She did not allow herself another sob. She stood straight and laughed to disguise the sensation of crying that still hung in her throat.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Two men came to the Forest,” said Finn.
“Fair-haired?” she asked.
Finn nodded. “They asked after a yellow-haired girl, and Mother said she never saw one and wouldn’t let one cross her gate if she did.”
Ani heaved a breath and nodded.
“The way to my mother’s house is the southwest Forest road called Lake, and then right toward the sign that says Spruces, and then other roads that go second on left, third on right, fifth on right, or you can ask anyone around there.”
Ani
repeated the way aloud several times to commit it to memory. They were looking for her. They did not think she was dead. They thought she was hiding. Fear tugged in her chest, but she pushed it down. No more. She took out the king’s silver coin and gave it to Finn.
“I came here to give this to you, not to cry,” she said. “For your mother, just part of all that I owe her.”
Finn took the coin but handed in exchange a brown paper-wrapped package from the cart. “From Mother.”
It was a deliciously thick pullover of Forest wool, in orange, brown, and blue, and on the back was the design of a yellow bird, wings out in flight. Unlike most of the other pullovers, he had somehow managed to keep it dry. She held it to her face and appreciated its warmth and the smell like a smoky fireside and the raw wool and wood floor of that safe shed where she had slept in the Forest.
“I can see that one can never pay back Gilsa for the fear that she will give again.”
As she left the market, spending her copper on a warm bun and a tracked-down thornroot, Ani saw that the hanged men had been transferred from the central platform to the city wall. It was long used to bearing the dead and was marked with the thin, dark blood of past corpses like stripes on a banner of decay. She swallowed the last, hard bit of bread and hurried past.
Chapter 12
Days later, Jok was still angry at Ani for leaving him in the pen two nights. She stood outside the pasture arch, counting the orange beaks as the geese waddled through, and she heard Jok’s familiar honk on the far side of the group, letting her know that he would not be sitting on her lap again that day. He was a true goose, and Ani was lonely under her beech, passing the time picking out words of goose speech and practicing new words to the wind.
At noon, when Conrad had crossed the hedge to the sheep boys’ field on his daily wanderings, Ani heard hoofbeats. It was one man on a dark horse, and he rode directly to her tree. Her muscles shook quietly, but she stayed still and watched the shadow of his hat move on his face until she recognized him.
“Goose girl,” Geric called out.
She stepped out from behind the tree and leaned against its smooth gray trunk. Geric dismounted and walked the horse to her, one hand resting on the neck of his mare.
“I don’t know your name,” he said.
“I’m called Isi,” she said.
“Isi. That suits you better than goose girl, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes, sorry that I didn’t know, before. Isi.”
“That’s all right. I didn’t tell you.”
“No, you didn’t, did you.”
“No.”
“Hmm,” he said. And coughed.
The conversation halted, Geric staring at a print his boot left in the still wet ground, Ani looking off toward the geese as though they might flee to the woods if not under her constant gaze. He cleared his throat and said the beginning of a word, then stopped and lowered his brow. Ani noticed that he had an expressive brow and eyes the color of warmed honey. She looked away from him to the horse.
“Not the bay,” she said. At her words, he looked up gratefully.
“No,” he said, “I traded him for one a mite tamer. I thought after my embarrassing display, it was clear the beast needed to be handled by a master. Did I do well?”
“Surely,” she said, surprised he sought her approval.
He was quiet again, and she waited.
“I came here for two days,” he said, “but you were gone, and the geese were gone, and I thought I was mistaken and it was a different pasture where we met.”
“No, but it was raining, and then it was marketday, of course. Don’t you go to market? And you came in the rain?”
Geric laughed a little. “I was wretched wet, and so were the flowers.”
He looked at her curiously, paused, and then deluged her with explanations. “I’m such a dunce, truly I am, and I went home that night after we spoke and you rode the horse, and I made that terrible error, made you feel as though I thought you were of less worth than a stone, I’m sure. Well, you know, I felt like a kingly dolt, as I should’ve. I hadn’t a right to come here and ride around like a fool and insult you and leave without explanation, except that I’ve never met a goose girl before, and you’re not what I expected, though that’s no explanation, I know. Still, I thought I’d better come back and bring you flowers, because I read that a gentleman gives a lady flowers, and I thought maybe I’m not a gentleman, but no reason not to treat you like a lady, isn’t that so?”
He waited for her to answer.
“Yes,” she said. It seemed the only answer to give. He nodded, relieved.
“Well, the rain made them a mess, the flowers, half of them bald of petals and the stems weak as noodles, and I was beginning to think that flowers were a silly idea, that you’d think, I don’t know what, but I kept them all week because the last couple of days I couldn’t escape to come and explain, and yesterday the flowers just flat died. So when I left today I didn’t have any flowers, and wasn’t sure I’d find you anyhow, so I grabbed what I could find, and it was food.” He pulled a potato sack off the back of his saddle and showed the contents: apples, a loaf of potato bread, cold ham, and a leather pouch filled with custard.
“What you could find? This’d be a feast in the workers’ hall. Are you a kitchen-man, then?”
“No, thanks be, or I could never escape so often as I do.” He gave her half a grin as he spread out their feast on the sack. “I should confess something to you. Some of the palace guards bet me that I couldn’t tame that bay, and if you had taken him for a time, I would’ve claimed credit for his taming.”
Ani gasped and smiled. “You would not.”
Geric laughed a little, bowing his head, and nodded. “Yes, yes, I probably would’ve. You may not know what terrible ego beatings we men give each other.”
“So, you’re a guard?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Now why couldn’t he have been one of mine? But if he were her guard, she would be a princess, and just then she wanted to be someone who sits in a pasture with another someone and eats cold ham on potato bread. So they did. After a time, he lost the halting manner of his apology, and they talked so long and easily that Ani’s throat went dry and she wished for water. He wanted to know all about how she passed her time. When he learned that his picnic was the first noon dinner she had eaten as a goose girl, Geric swore he would bring her dinner every day.
“If I ruled, you’d all dine,” he said.
“Would that you were king.”
Jok rushed toward her, honking all the way as though he would bite her, but she honked once to stop his advance, and he turned and waddled away.
“What was all that?” asked Geric, standing.
“Jok, my little friend. He’s angry that I’ve left him in the goose pen these past nights. He’s grown used to sleeping in the crook of my knee.”
“Well, I’ll have none of that, some brazen bird speaking harsh words to his mistress. After all, I’m a gentleman.” He stuck out his tongue in an ungentlemanly face and ran after Jok. The goose soon realized he was being pursued and fled across the field, flying in short spurts and running as fast as his flat feet could propel him. Geric slipped once on the wet grass but quickly regained his feet and grabbed Jok around the middle.
“It’s time for an apology,” he said, walking back to the beech with Jok in hand. “I’ve become an expert in apologies today, so I know, little brother, that it’s time.”
“Careful, Geric, you might—” said Ani as Jok turned his head and bit Geric on the arm. Geric exclaimed and dropped the goose who wasted no time in fleeing the scene. And Ani, despite her experience with goose bruises, could not hold back a laugh.
“I’m sorry, my lady,” said Geric, rubbing his arm, “but I failed to force an apology out of the offending goose.”
“You’re not likely to, either. He’s a naughty bird. They all are.”
“Poor c
ompany.”
“Oh, but I like my geese. Like cats, they can’t be told what to do, and like dogs, they’re loyal, and like people, they talk every chance they get.”
“Though they’ll not deliver half so good an apology as I do.”
“Not half so good,” she said.
They laughed together and lay back on the grass, their heads on his rolled cloak, chuckling intermittently and claiming clouds to be ponies and dragons and large-bosomed women. Geric took his leave long after noon. He promised to return the following day if he could, hoisted himself on the mare’s back, and rode away.
“Geric,” she called.
He turned back around.
“What kind of flowers were they?”
“I don’t rightly know,” he said. He made faltering gestures with his hands, forming their size and shape from the air. “They were yellow, and smallish, and had lots of petals.”
“Thank you,” she said. “They were beautiful.”
Ani looked toward the stream and held a branch of her beech tree as she might hold a hand. The river birches were leafing brilliant—hundreds of thin, gold coins dangling from their arms. It was perfect, as though their green leaves had been a falsehood all those months and just now the trees showed their realness, their pure autumnal yellows. Ani felt a stirring, a hope, a winged thing waking up in her chest and brushing her heart with its feathers.
Geric came back the next day, and the next, and more, and they sat in the shade of the tree or walked together along the spongy rim of the goose pond, the birds moving at their feet like incarnations of the bright white words that fell from their mouths.
“How do you get away so often?” said Ani.
“When the prince doesn’t go out, I’ve nothing to do. I’m his guard.”
“Oh. What’s he like?”
Geric grinned. “Oh, he’s a nice enough lad, but not half as charming as I am.”
Yes, she thought, I’m certain you’re right.
He was ignorant of goose-keeping and listened with interest as Ani explained what she knew. When she mentioned how much time she sat alone, the next day Geric brought her books on Bayern history and some tales of courtly love, evil, and justice. He was afraid at first that he had erred again and that she had never learned to read, and then he was relieved that she had.