by Shannon Hale
Ani felt her lips part in amazement. How could she have been so blind all those years?
“Oh, Selia, I am so sorry I never saw.” Ani placed a hand on her shoulder. Selia slapped it away.
“That is because I was careful that you would not see,” Selia said. Her eyes dried up. “For years I have been waiting for my chance, and now here it is. Don’t touch me and don’t call for me. I am no longer your servant. You, what are you? The brat of lucky parents who were related to a childless king. There is no such thing as royal blood. I believe we are what we make ourselves, and as such, you, Crown Princess, are nothing.” Selia spoke as though she had held those words inside for too long and they burned her mouth as she spoke them.
“But I—you said—I thought you wanted to come.” Ani knew this was not fair but found it difficult to protest. Her thoughts spun and bumped against one another like dizzy children. Was this the effect of the gift of people-speaking? Every word Selia spoke seemed to be the purest truth. You are nothing. You make yourself nothing. She took a step back, prepared to back down, as always, ready to apologize and wait for time to ease the memory.
A warm breath of wind came from the deeper trees and ran across Ani’s neck. A corner of her mother’s handkerchief stood out from her bodice, and the wind tapped it against her breastbone. Ani thought its touch sparked her heart to beat faster, her skin to tingle, her blood to warm her hands and feet. A gift from my mother, Ani thought. Protection, she had said.
Ani met Selia’s stare and straightened her neck.
“Put down the dress, Selia,” she said. Selia paused. Ani had never commanded her in anything. “Put down my dress,” she repeated.
Selia tossed the dress back in the wagon. Her face was flushed, and her nostrils flared. “Go tell your guards, Crown Princess. Go stir your army. Go demand your throne and teach me a lesson—anything! I dare you.”
“I am no longer a crown princess,” Ani said, and her own steady tone encouraged her. “You mock me with the title. From now on, you will address me as Princess, or mistress, if you prefer, since you have never seen fit to call me by my name. My friends call me by my name.”
“You don’t have any friends.”
“I don’t want you to be my friend, Selia, or my servant, not now. I thought you were both. You have let me know I was wrong. So are you to treat me so. You are wrong.”
“Oh, my dear, dear Royal Majesty, you don’t know the half of it.” Selia started to smile, but she dropped her eyes from Ani’s face and walked away.
Ani did not move until she had caught her breath. Her limbs were trembling, and the anger that had suddenly flushed her face and steadied her voice now left her a little worn and a little cold. But, for a moment, she had almost sounded as confident as her mother, and she wondered where the courage to stand up to Selia had come from.
Ani pulled the handkerchief from her bodice. The cloth was old, the original white dimmed with age. Her mother’s blood stood out clearly, three spots of dark brown. She fingered the delicate lacing around the edges.
Maybe, she thought, it is a thing of magic. Maybe my mother’s blood renewed its power.
She thought of the bedside tales that spoke of mothers and blood. A mother who nurses her baby on one breast of milk and one breast of blood, and her child grows to be a powerful warrior. A young girl is cursed to never become a woman, and when the mother lies dying of old age, she cuts her wrist and washes her daughter in the blood, and the curse is undone. These stories had intrigued her with their strange mix of violence and love, so unlike the distant, passionless affection of her own mother.
She thought, she hoped, that the handkerchief was something fantastic, like a piece of a tale, but real, and just for her, a symbol of the real, hidden love of her mother. She so desperately wanted something magical, something powerful, something that meant her mother had not flung her aside but loved her as deeply as her own heart. Ani tucked the handkerchief back into her bodice, convincing herself that since the gates of the palace, the handkerchief had in some measure been protecting her.
That night, Ani set up her own bedroll. Ingras exclaimed at Selia’s refusal to serve, but Ani would not have anyone ordered to be her servant, or her friend. In the privacy of her tent, Ani struggled with the laces of her bodice and called herself a fool for ever trusting anyone. Through the slit in her tent flap she could see Talone instructing the night watch. She wanted to trust him, but that dark encounter with Ishta and Selia’s betrayal were both painful barbs she could not pluck out. At least I have Falada as a true friend, she thought, and the handkerchief as protection.
Two weeks after the halfway mark, a stream pregnant with summer runoff crossed their path and rose to flow over the road’s bridge. Talone recommended they halt early and test the sodden wood for rotting before crossing the next day. Ungolad seemed pleased with the diversion, saying that some leagues upstream there was a waterfall.
“A sight for eyes wearied by endless trees,” he said. “A sight even royalty might deem worthy to behold.” He nodded at Ani.
The main part of the company followed Ungolad up a deer trail along the river. Ani stayed behind, and Ungolad seemed disappointed. But as she brushed Falada, a breeze lifted off the river and wound its damp essence in her hair and wrapped its coolness around her face, and with it, for a moment, she thought she saw the image of a waterfall shimmer before her eyes. Her imagination, she determined, and batted the breeze away.
Still, she had never seen a waterfall, and it would be a pity to pass blindly by. While Talone and others investigated the bridge, Ani took to the deer trail.
The forest ground was spongy but pleasant footing after weeks of riding. She liked the sensation of walking on soil hollowed by deep tree roots, the noise of her steps muted echoes. The smell of pine and cool water freshened the world, and Ani felt eager.
These last days had been tense and strange, the coldness from so many of the guards, Selia’s flushed face and eyes shining with anger and hate, and the burden of a handkerchief that throbbed with mystery at her heart. But now, off the road, the forest was pleasing, green like spring wheat and yet ancient and ponderous as the books of the palace library. The upper branches wrestled with the high forest wind. Below, the rumor of the river answered. Ani felt that she moved in the middle of a great conversation between sky and earth.
Soon the sound of crashing water overwhelmed all else. Ani approached the sound and ducked under the branches of a fir. There at her feet burst the white eruptions of the river, shaking the earth and breathing out a mist that wet her hair. The water fell straight for the height of three men, then continued to churn around rocks and smaller falls until the land evened farther downstream. She could see the movements of Ungolad’s group above the falls and decided not to join them, enjoying the unfamiliar solitude.
Somewhere behind her she heard the dim call of a bird to its mate. Fly away, danger. It was a common cry among the woodland birds she had listened to as a child, and the familiar call in that foreign place made her feel as though the words were spoken to her. Danger. Fly away. She reached above her, gripped a branch, and began to step away from the edge.
At the same moment, something knocked the back of her ankles, and her feet slipped. Ani held to the tree and pulled her feet back onto land, and watched the stone that had struck her topple over the edge and drop into the river.
The ground beneath her was slick and wet. If she had not been holding on to a branch at that moment, she would have gone the way of the stone and possibly cracked her head on a rock or been held under by the strong current and drowned. She looked around to see what had disturbed so large a stone. No one. But perhaps, she thought, for just a moment, there had been a flash of gold. Perhaps it had been the tip of a yellow braid disappearing in the timber and shadow.
Ani ran back to camp, grimacing with each step for her sore ankles, and was brushing Falada when the hikers returned. Ungolad saw her and for a moment seemed surprised to see her al
ive and dry, but his expression changed again so quickly that she questioned if she had seen truly.
He passed her, patted her shoulder, and said, “You missed a fine waterfall, Princess.”
She was not sure that he or anyone had thrown that stone. But even if he did, she thought, I’m protected. I don’t need to fear. She patted the handkerchief at her chest and believed even more fervently that it was protecting her, that she could hear the voice of her mother’s blood even as she heard the birds speak.
A week after the waterfall, the company came to a tree as thick as five men that had fallen across the road. While some of the guards and horses worked at moving the obstacle for the wagons, the rest of the company forged their own way through the forest. Ani and Falada wove through the trees a bit apart from the others.
Something is not right, said Falada.
What is it?
I do not know. His ears twisted to listen behind and to the side, but he kept on walking.
Stop a moment, said Ani. She leaned forward to pat his neck.
Suddenly Falada whined and reared. Ani clutched at his mane and gripped his middle with her legs, saying all the while, Easy, Falada, it is nothing, easy now.
Falada got his footing back and quieted down. His skin shivered under the saddle.
Something whipped me, he said.
Ani looked back and saw no one. Immediately to the right ran a long gorge, a fall steep enough to break a neck.
Ani and Falada caught up to the rest on the road and pulled alongside Ungolad at the end of the company. She looked the guard over. His braids hung down his back like slain prey thrown over the hunter’s shoulder. He wore a long sword at his side. He was looking forward, squinting in the sun. Some bit of courage was prickling inside her, begging her for action. She considered Ungolad’s horse, a bay nearly as tall as Falada.
Falada, can you tell me about this horse and what he thinks of his rider?
Falada whisked his tail and turned an eye to the horse beside him. There was a change in the rhythm of his walk, and he lowered his head. The bay shook his head and picked his hooves up higher. From long association with Falada, Ani thought she could detect the spirit of the bay’s response but waited for Falada’s words to make her certain. Ungolad noticed the princess’s attention, and he smiled at her.
“Do you admire my beast, Princess?” he said.
She nodded. “He is a pretty horse, and you ride him well. He seems a bit meek, but I have observed that you like to be in absolute control.”
Ungolad blinked in surprise. She felt surprised herself, and she smiled pleasantly.
“You are a student of men and horses, then,” he said, “and I had heard that all you were fit for was to be married off and produce princelings.”
Ungolad’s comment would have stung, but its carelessness suggested that she had startled him, and she felt encouraged to continue.
“In my study of horses, I can say a fair bit about yours,” she said as Falada silently related to her all he had learned. “He was a wild colt, caught and trained later than usual, and had to be thoroughly broken, which made him ridable, but broke his spirit as well. He has had many owners and has been beaten into obedience so often that by the time he came into your hands he was as docile as a cow. He thinks you are unpredictable, heavier than you used to be, and smell unpleasantly. And he has a stone in his right front hoof.”
Ungolad laughed with obvious force. “Well, Princess, you have more game spirit in you than I thought.” He smiled, and the very tips of his teeth peered through his parted lips.
“Thank you,” she said, smiled graciously, and kicked Falada into a trot to the front of the company. Her hands were shaking and blood rushed into her fingertips, and she nearly laughed out loud. She fingered a corner of the handkerchief. My mother’s blood is protecting me, she thought. I have nothing to fear.
At the next stop, she saw Ungolad, glowering, remove a small stone from his horse’s right front hoof.
As they neared Bayern, the road pushed the trees farther away, and at midday there was no shade. The company was weary and sun sick. It was a bright and burning afternoon when they passed a small trading party going toward Kildenree.
“Ho there, sir,” said Talone. “How many days since you left Bayern?”
“Six days’ll take you to the city, if that’s where you’re going.” He lifted his wide-brimmed sun hat as he caught sight of Ani. She smiled at his accent. He spoke his words carelessly, letting each word bleed into the next, his vowels short and consonants ringing out from his throat. She turned to see Selia, wondering if she also remembered that accent from the time the Bayern prime minister visited Kildenree five years ago, but her lady-in-waiting held back by the rear guard. The trader did not see her.
“And how many since the last town or settlement?” said Ungolad.
“Oh, two, I’d say, at a good pace.”
Ani saw Ungolad and Selia exchange looks.
That night at camp, there were two fires. Dano, the cook-man, built the first, and Talone, Ingras, the wagon drivers, and some of the guards gathered around it. Ungolad built the second and drew in Selia and the majority of the guards. Ani turned from brushing down Falada to see the camp split into two parts, and she felt that something definite had been decided. She stood between them and did not know what to do.
Talone noticed her and walked to her side. “Princess, you look concerned.”
His face was lined with age, his temples graying. He had been faithful to her mother for many years, but did that mean he was faithful to her?
“What is it?” he said.
Ani twisted the handkerchief between her fingers and forced herself to look at him directly in the eyes. “Talone, can I trust you?”
He blinked and looked as though she had wrenched an arrow from his side. “I have failed you if you must ask that question.” He put a fist over his heart and said in his strong, solid voice, “I swear fealty to you, Princess Anidori-Kiladra, and promise to shield you to your safety and, if you wish it, will remain your personal guard until my dotage and death.”
She blinked at the force of his pledge, and gratitude and relief filled her. Feeling that the oath required a sign of her acceptance, she looked about her for something to give him. All she had on her person of value were two rings. She slipped one with a ruby droplet from her second finger and placed it in his hand. “Thank you, Talone.”
Talone seemed moved, and lowering his head for a moment so she could not see his eyes, he tucked the ring into his vest pocket. “Thank you, Princess.” He led her to his fire, where the conversation was bubbling with unease at the splitting of the group.
“I don’t like their attitude,” said Adon, Talone’s second in command. He was a young man, eager for action. “Ungolad’s friends make it clear they follow him and not you, Captain. I swear they grow more insubordinate the closer we get to Bayern. Smells like mutiny.”
“Ungolad seemed interested to know how long it would take us to reach the first town,” said Ani.
“They might have friends there,” said Radal.
“Or plan to do something before we reach witnesses,” said Adon.
“Or they are just eager to sleep in a bed and eat real food again,” said Radal. “Aren’t we all?”
“Mmm.” Talone eyed the princess. “I don’t know what it means. It may be they intend to stay in Bayern and not return to Kildenree next spring. But, Princess, if there is any sign of trouble, you jump on the nearest horse and ride away. Do not stop until you get to the king and safety.”
Ani felt goose bumps rise on her arm. “Safety? What do you think they would do?”
“Nothing. I am just being cautious.” Talone stood and approached Ungolad’s group. The frivolity died down, and soon the party broke up. Talone assigned the watches that night to his most trusted men, but Ani hardly slept. She clutched the handkerchief at her breast.
The next morning dawned a bright, stinging sun. The company rod
e in a long line up next to the trees, hoping for a forest breeze or the occasional branch of shade. By the time they stopped to camp two hours from sundown, everyone was sick from the heat and headachy from squinting in the sun. The evening was warm and stale under the heavy-limbed canopies, and the air was sticky with the odor of pine, seemingly too thick to breathe.
There was a small clearing just off the road where the company set up camp. Ani, prodded by Falada’s grumbling of thirst, tossed off her pack and walked Falada through a thicket of trees toward the sounds of a stream. She dismounted, threw off her sweat-soaked sun hat, and bent over to fill her gold cup. As she dipped the cup under, the cold water against her heated skin shocked her, and she dropped it. The gold winked green through the water before the current pulled it down and away. She thought, One less thing to separate me from everyone else, and lay down on her stomach, scooping the water with her hands to her lips. Her sleeves to her elbows soaked through, and she felt the cold water on her neck and on her chest. She shivered and drank.
Princess, you lost something in the river, said Falada at her side.
Yes, my cup, she said.
Princess, said Falada again.
But a shout came from the camp, and Ani stood and turned away.
Something is happening, she said.
She could still hear the echo of Falada’s last word to her—Princess. But she walked away, toward the camp and the commotion. Embarrassed that the breast of her dress was soaked through, Ani decided to slip behind a copse of trees that separated her from the party and avoid being seen. Through a break in the leaves, she spied on the camp. Yulan was shouting. He had removed his shirt in the heat. Talone stood by. His hand rested on his side just above his sword hilt.
