by Shannon Hale
“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 scraping 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.
“Conrad, I’ll keep you cleaning eggs off the floor at bed-hour, believe I will, so meet Isi and sit down.”
Conrad sniffed. He put the fistful of eggs casually on his plate, rubbed the sticky pieces onto his pant leg, and held out his hand to Ani. He had dull gray eyes, and the freckles on his face lay together as tightly as scales.
“Name’s Conrad,” he said. “I keep the geese.”
“Kiss her,” someone shouted over the din of breakfast.
Conrad jerked his head toward the yeller and yelled back, “Shut it or I’ll stuff your nose holes full of breakfast, and I’ll clean it and you off the floor until next morning if I have to.”
He renewed his gesture of welcome, and Ani took his hand and then surreptitiously wiped off the egg goo behind her back.
“Good to meet you,” she said.
“Where you from?” said a girl in the back.
“The Forest,” she said.
“Of course you are, you sparrow chick,” said the girl, “but which part?”
Ani realized that most of this group must have come from the Forest to work in the city and send money home to families.
“Near Darkpond,” she said, repeating the place she had heard Finn’s neighbors speak of.
“She talks like someone I know from Darkpond,” Ani heard a girl say.
Some nodded, and she was dropped out of the general attention in favor of breakfast. Ani ate slowly, focusing on swallowing the heavy, hot food that it seemed too early to eat. She watched Conrad and hi
s friends, amazed at the heaping plates of eggs and lumps of beans with mutton chunks and hot, greasy oat muffins they consumed with careless speed. When the dishes were empty, they wiped their mouths on the backs of their hands, their hands on their trousers, or on each other in brief, concentrated wrestling matches, and the benches emptied with rousing scrapes of wood against the stone floor.
“Get your stick,” said Conrad, grabbing his own from where it stood with the others near the door. As they left, a chorus of “Conrad’s got a girl, Conrad’s girl,” moved from mouth to mouth.
“Come on, goose girl,” Conrad said testily, and they walked up a narrow street.
Ani used the base of her stick between stones to help her climb. Conrad did not wait, and she caught up to him when the steepness had ebbed out. Soon Ani could hear the mutterings of animals—sheep, pig, chicken, goat—they lost their particularity in their numbers. Conrad unlocked the door of a low structure. The jabber of housed geese greeted their entrance, and immediately Ani realized that their language was far different from swan. She found herself unable to pick out a single word.
“You kept geese before?” said Conrad. Ani shook her head, and he rolled his eyes. “Take it easy at first, all right? Just let me do it and you stand back and make sure they don’t wander away. Geese don’t like new people, but better a new girl than a new boy. The ganders nearly bit the knees off the last boy that came crawling from the Forest looking for a city job. He didn’t last long with me. With the pigs, now.”
“Thanks for the warning,” she said.
“I don’t care if they bite off your kneecaps, goose girl, I’m just telling you.” He shrugged and opened the pen.
Geese were smaller and much less grand than the swans she knew. Though like her swans in form, the geese seemed simplified by larger heads, shorter necks, and feet and bills orange like exotic fruit.
The palace grounds in Kildenree did not have a goose pen, and Ani had seen the birds only from a distance. Sometimes from the library window she had watched a short-haired country girl with bare feet, a stick, and a hat made of thick paper rolled in on itself like a whittled bit of wood. She used to walk a dozen geese down a river-sided lane toward the free pastures on the edges of the city. It had seemed carefree enough to Ani then, and the girl had given the impression of happy complacency, the geese at her feet just pale flutterings of her thoughts.
Ani’s thoughts were pulled back to the moment by a loud, unlovely honk. A broad-headed gander stepped out of the pen and knocked Ani’s leg with his beak. She tumbled backward in surprise and landed on her backside. When she looked up again, his neck and head were stooped down to the ground and forward, as though his body held a ready sword. He was rushing forward, his open, hissing beak aimed at her face. She flung her arms over her head and tensed for pain, and when nothing happened, she peeked out to see Conrad’s crook around the gander’s neck.
“Stand up,” he said. “That’s a stupid thing to do.”
Ani scrambled to her feet, leaning over to her dropped stick with an eye on the geese.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Huh. Let’s go.”
It was several long, bruising streets to the pasture gate. Fifty geese were too many for one boy and worse for a boy and a goose-ignorant girl who more often than not found herself in the middle of the gaggle, her calves nipped emphatically. Conrad maintained his position in the rear, driving the horde with whistles and nudges from his staff. Occasionally he shouted, “Goose girl, they’re drifting,” and sent her scampering after a loose bunch.
Ani listened in vain to their mutterings to pick out familiar sounds. She tried some swan, and they seemed to laugh at her and nip at her legs a little harder.
At last they reached a narrow, arched gateway cut in the city wall. Beyond it lay green pastures, bordered on the near side by the outside of the city wall and on the far by tall water trees and a narrow stream. The sight of the pasture caught the geese’s attention like the smell of food after a fast. Their necks straightened, and their small eyes focused on the grass and the shimmering stream beyond.
Ani slipped through the arch before them to count the bright beaks as they passed by. It was a bulky wave of white, defined by orange bills and blue eyes.
“Forty-seven,” said Ani. “There should be fifty, but I’d pledge blood we didn’t let a one get away.”
Conrad shrugged.
“Aren’t you concerned?” she said. “Shouldn’t we go back and look?”
He met her look with defiance. “They were missing before. I’ve been alone with this rabble for more than a week, and what can I do if three disappear when there’re forty-seven off in every direction? I’d like to see you do better.”
The day moved slowly with the sun, and Ani stayed in the shade of a lone beech tree in the middle of their pasture. Not distant from her feet lay the near lip of a small pond that filled with the edges of the stream. The geese wandered near the pond, moving in groups of five or so to graze where the grass was longer or digging for grubs on the muddy banks. It was not a broad pasture, but long, bordered on both ends with hedges that served as fences, beyond which Ani caught glimpses of sheep on one side and something else, maybe cows, on the other.
Ani gazed into the distance, hoping to see horses out to graze, and among them, Falada. But Tatto had told her the horses were kept in the city pastures behind the palace. To assuage her guilt, Ani reasoned that Falada was probably much better off than she, eating mountains of oats and sleeping contentedly in the royal stables. If he was not dead. That thought stung. And if he was, how could she find out without being killed herself?
Speculation was useless. There was no occasion to leave the fields all that day. What was I expecting, thought Ani, an hour off for tea? Hours past noon, a street hawker leaned out of the pasture arch announcing hot meat-breads in a clear, practiced call. Conrad waved him away with a disappointed gesture. Neither goose girl nor goose boy had any money.
When the sharp orange of evening sun burned on the horizon, Conrad called to her that it was time to go. He had remained separate from Ani all the day, seeking his shade under the birches that grew along the stream, tossing stones upstream and lazily chasing geese to hear them honk.
The herding home was easier. The geese were worn from the day and ready to rest. Only once were the crooks employed, when a couple of ganders left the group to make sport of a broken-toothed street cat that had come too close to one of the females.
When they had locked the geese into their pen and stumbled into the dining house, Ani at last understood the concentrated devouring of breakfast. Her stomach perked up at the smell of food, muttering and tightening itself in anticipation.
Dinner with the workers was as lively as the breakfast had been, despite the fact, Ani noted, that they were fed bean and lard pies, potatoes without butter, and green beans that were cooked to mush. The group ate vigorously, and Ani felt inclined to do the same. The smell of animals on people was even more pungent, but Ani ate through it.
A noise drew her attention to the door. It slammed behind a girl near Ani’s age, red faced and huffing for breath. Her black hair was loose at her shoulders, and she had wide eyes that put Ani in mind of an owl. She leaned against the doorpost, waved her hand at a group of boys who stood nearby, and, swallowing air, pushed her voice through her throat.
“Quick. Razo, Beier. That sulky old ram . . . he beat down a hole in his pen . . . got into my chick coop . . . I tried to stop him, but I—”
Without a word, two of the boys grabbed the nearest crooks and fled the hall. The door shut, and the girl faced the hall. Immediately Ani noticed that the girl’s expression changed. She no longer fought for breath, and a creeping smile pressed dimples into her cheeks. “But I couldn’t stop him because I was so busy rigging a bucket of oat mush above the door.”
Laughter bubbled out of the corners of the hall, building as the other workers caught on. Ani smiled, too, and shook her head as her imagi
nation raced to the coop, where those poor boys were opening the door. The girl bobbed a curtsy and sat on Ani’s bench.
“It’s a payback,” she said, grabbing a cold bean pie. “They put colored eggs in one of my chickens’ nests for a week. I poured every medicine I knew down that poor hen’s throat and laid witch-bought charms around her nest until I finally spotted a bit of paint on some hay. Devilish, they are.”
The girl smiled with good humor, and Ani smiled back until she felt shamed by the girl’s prettiness and confidence and looked down.
“You’re from Darkpond?” said the girl. “I’m Enna, from Sprucegrove area, you know, just down past the stream.”
Ani nodded.
“Not to worry. Conrad’s no festival, but he’s all right enough. He takes time to warm up to new people, just like any animal.”
“I’ve only just arrived in the city,” said Ani. “My first time here, really.” Enna raised her brows, and Ani nodded, grateful to have some truth to tell. “Can you tell me news? What happens here?”
A boy across the table heard her question and snorted. “Not much, not for us, you see that. Not a day off—”
“But marketday,” said another.
“—but marketday, and maybe a festival or two, but won’t be another festival until wintermoon, and then who knows.”
No break until next marketday. Ani realized she would have to wait a month for an opportunity to find Falada. But surely he was well off, she convinced herself. If he is alive, he must be well.
“When’s the prince married?” asked a girl one bench over.
Ani casually put her hand on her neck to hide the goose bumps pricking her skin.
“Oh, don’t recall,” said the boy. “Not now, anyway.”
“There’ll be festival then, you’ll see, like the royals like to have to toot their royalness. It’ll be a week long with little work and apple cakes for free.”
Ani tilted her head and tried to speak as though the answer did not matter the least in the world. “Getting married, is the prince?” she said. “To whom?”
