by Shannon Hale
“It goes like this. In a farm village far away there’s a maiden with hair like the yellow apple, and she works in the fields all day with her head down and her hair dragging alongside so that the tips’re black as raven beaks. Sometimes the wind catches her hair and pulls it up into the air, and the maiden looks up to where the wind is going, up to the high pastures where the wild horses run.”
Razo approached, glum from losing his game, and asked Enna what they were doing.
“Isi’s telling a tale,” said Bettin. “Sit and listen.”
“One day her mother says, ‘Go to the high pastures, you lazy girl. Go and bring back dry wood for a cookfire.’ So the maiden runs out of the fields she knows and up to the high pastures, and she pulls up the dead roots of a lightning-struck tree. But underneath, deep in the dark soil, you know what she finds? A nugget of gold that’s growing like a potato. The maiden knows she should dig it up and take it to her mother, but she’s heard of the mystery of the wild horses, and so crouches nearby and waits. The horses come.”
“What horses?” said Razo. “What mystery?”
“Shut your hole, Razo, and just listen,” said Enna.
Ani wished she had not started, because now the hall was quieting, and many of the workers nearby were turning toward her. Enna prodded her knee and smiled, telling her to continue. She took a deep breath and fought to remember her aunt’s words, but she could remember only images. The words were her own. She let them come.
“Wild horses, white as light on water, tall as cherry trees. They love to run, so fast they think they can become the wind if they just keep running. They run by the maiden, and the wind of their running blows her hair around her.
“And then one horse sees a flash of gold, and he stops. He paws away the soil, nudges the gold from the ground, and chews it up, fast as a carrot. Gold-colored spittle drips from his chin, his eyes are brighter, he shakes his mane. Now when he breathes out, there’s music. This’s why she waits.”
“What kind of music?” said Bettin.
“It’s music more beautiful than a woman, more beautiful than a tree. It’s almost as beautiful as the horses that run, so fast and so wild because they want to become the wind. The song’s the sound of that wanting, of the wish for loosing of manes, and hooves that don’t touch the ground, and breath that doesn’t end.”
Bettin smiled, and Ani raised her head and met the eyes of those who were listening.
“The maiden returns every day to pull up roots and dig up rooted gold and hear the horses breathe out the music of flight. Every night she goes home and her mother beats her with a switch for not working the fields, and her back’s bent like the snow-heavy birches, and she thinks about those horses who’ve never been broken, not like her. But now she’s heard that song, and she disobeys her mother and returns every day. The song’s so beautiful that pain doesn’t hurt.”
“I think I know what that means,” someone whispered.
“Then one day, there’s no more gold. The maiden pulls up roots until her fingers bleed, and she digs in the dirt with her fingernails, but the ground’s empty. When the horses run by, they don’t stop, and she puts her face on the ground and cries.
“The tears clear her thoughts, and she sits up. My hair, she thinks. I know what to do. So she goes to the snow-melt stream and washes the dirt from her hair, and it shines like a sunrise on a still pond. Then she takes a leather knife and cuts it off, all, right from her head, and puts it on the ground. She sleeps by it all night and doesn’t feel cold.
“The next day the horses pass. Their running feels like earthquakes and sounds like thunder, and they don’t stop for her hand-cut gold. But before her heart breaks, the last horse stops. He paws at her loose hair and looks up and sees her. Then, slowly, as though it’s a handful of hay, he eats her golden mane. This time when he breathes out, the song that’s on the air pierces her heart like a terrible, perfect knife. The horse shimmers and begins to run, faster and faster, and his white hide becomes whiter and whiter until it’s too brilliant to see. There’s a flash, and when she blinks, the horse is gone and a white-maned wind whinnies and prances and pushes around her. And the maiden mounts that wind and is borne away, up into the higher pastures, up and never seen again.”
The hall was quiet. The hearth fire snapped at the silence, and the flames lowered themselves inside the glowing embers. Ani waited.
“She was never seen again,” said Enna.
“What does that mean?” Beier whispered to Conrad. “Did she become wind, too?”
Conrad shrugged.
“It’s true?” said Bettin.
“I don’t think it’s supposed to be true or false. My aunt told it to me a long time ago.”
“I don’t get it,” said Conrad.
“Well, thanks be for that,” said Enna, a protective hand on Ani’s shoulder. “If you had to get every story ever told, we’d be in short supply.”
Conrad’s face flushed, and he turned to Ani. “Well, what’s it supposed to mean? Horses eating gold and turning into wind. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know,” said Ani. She looked at her hands. “I guess I never really knew what it meant, I just thought it was beautiful. I remember when my mother overheard my aunt tell me a story like that one, my mother was mad. But my aunt said, if we don’t tell strange stories, when something strange happens we won’t believe it.”
“That’s true,” said Razo. “I haven’t heard much of strange stories for years, and when Ideca served us rotten cold bean soup for the third time last week, I couldn’t believe it myself.”
“Isi said something strange, Razo,” said Enna. “Ideca’s cold bean soup three times is as ordinary as your boots smelling of sheep dung.”
Bettin rose and yawned. “You’d best tell another story tomorrow, Isi, or I mayn’t believe my dreams tonight.”
A murmur of assent passed through the hall, and most nodded their heads. Tomorrow, and every night, tell a tale.
The night air was dark and heavy in after-rain when Ani left the hall for her room. The moon cleared a scrap of sky, and the moonlight turned the outside of her windowpane into a silver mirror. She stooped there a moment, examining her eyebrows to see if marketday would require another purchase of thornroot. They were dark brown, though perhaps fading from the darker color of a month before.
Ani glanced at her full face and stopped. It was the first time she had looked at herself since the morning she had left her mother’s palace. Her face was emphasized by the headscarf, rounder and paler, but, she was surprised to see, not sadder. This reflection seemed more significant than the one she had often seen in the palace mirrors, staring back in simple boredom.
She looked at her face now as she might study a coin from a foreign country, deciphering what it was worth and what it could buy her. The reflection was not unkind, though it appeared raw and untested in the bleached light. She thought now it was time to be tested, to make decisions and find her own roads, to stop falling where she was told to fall and to stand only when allowed to stand.
“I would break my mother’s heart,” she whispered. She remembered her mother saying those words the day she left, and the memory brought a grim smile. The handkerchief, that peculiar tie to her mother’s heart, was gone. It had been temporary, artificial. Her mother had never given her heart, Ani thought, just three drops of blood, blood that could be washed away, a handkerchief that could be lost. She had leaned against the idea of her mother’s perfection all her childhood, as though it were the cane to her lameness. But that crutch had not served her.
She was little like her mother, though that was all she had ever longed to be. She lacked the gift of people-speaking, that power to convince and control that laced every word her mother uttered. She did not possess that grace and beauty that all in a room turned to watch. But had the queen ever told a nursery story to a room of captivated listeners? Or handled fifty head of geese? Ani smiled at the thought, and then she surprised
herself by feeling proud. I’ve done that much. What more can I do?
Chapter 11
The dawn sun cut through the rain-cleaned air, and it seemed to pierce the eyes and skin, quick and impatient. Ani wore her orange rose tunic and skirt and her hat with the orange ribbon, feeling like the resplendent lizards and frogs from the south that men sold in tiny cages to rich marketgoers. Razo said if you licked the sticky flesh of the frogs, you saw colors bright as their skin. What a strange city. She thought about lizards and merchants and the bright, scoured air to keep from thinking about where she was going.
Into a trap, she thought. But she did not want to wait for a safe time to address the king. She must find a way to see Falada—today.
The palace sat like a ponderous beast in the shadows of morning, rising ever taller, gaining width and art and intricacies as she approached and as the sun lit out its stony features. Already a serpentine queue of marketday supplicants reached near the palace gate. Ani stopped behind the last person, just as she had on this day one month ago, but this time when the line moved forward, she slipped out to the inside of the palace wall. She passed several guards and errand boys along the cold shadow of the wall, and they nodded, greeting the goose girl as a fellow laborer. She nodded back and began to smile at the simplicity of the break-in as she neared the stables.
The horse fields were cut into the back of the palace hill, acres long and just as wide. The grandeur of the palace gardens to the east competed for attention, with autumn roses and ice blue fountains and trees hanging their leafy heads low like long-haired waiting maids drying their tresses at a fire. But to Ani’s eyes, the horse grounds were more beautiful.
Ani scurried to the nearest stable and ducked in. A worker passed her by without looking up, and she jogged down the long line of stalls, searching for a white head and mane. No luck. She jogged to the next building, where there were no workers and the stalls were nearly empty. She checked each one, calling, Falada, Falada, in her mind. There was one sleeping white mare that made her heart leap in her chest before she saw clearly that this was not the horse she knew.
Ani had finished investigating the far side of stalls when the hushed tones of a familiar accent froze her where she stood.
“In here, you dog,” he said.
Ani dropped to the straw floor and held her breath. They were a long way down, but his voice echoed on the high roof, and she could clearly hear the Kildenrean accent.
“Now just listen to me for a moment, before it’s Ungolad that is setting you straight. There is no time for pranks and pleasantries. The princess is not in yet, if you understand me.”
“We are here. I don’t see what all the hush-hush fuss is still about.”
“You dull-witted bumble.” This was the first voice, and Ani knew him now. One of her guards, one of Ungolad’s men, a curly-haired soldier named Terne. “This is not over. There is still a marriage to take place. And don’t forget we have the little impostor running around the forest somewhere, sure to shoot off her mouth and require all kinds of doctoring to keep our position. And did you forget that we still have a kingdom one forest away that will be sending emissaries and little sisters and such nuisances? The two masters’ plan for dealing with that is still not enacted.”
“Yes, but I don’t see why all the sneaking still, and no travel and no fun. I feel like a chicken in a cramped coop and Ungolad checking my unders for fresh eggs.”
There was a sound of a brief scuffle, and the second man quieted. “Look,” said Terne, sounding as though he spoke through clenched teeth, “are you begging for a private audience with her puissantness? Is that what you want? I’m telling you to be sober for a while. You pick a side and you stay on it, you hear me, Hul?”
The conversation went quiet when she heard a third person enter the stable.
“Sirs,” said a Bayern accent.
“Yes, morning,” said Terne, and the two men left.
Ani sat still, feeling each heartbeat rage in her chest. If those two men had spotted her, darkened eyebrows and a wide-brimmed hat would not hide her identity. They could escort her to a nearby wood without trouble, run her through, and leave her body to be disposed of by wild beasts. The fear lodged in her throat ran to her knees, making them shake under her weight as she stood up.
The men were gone. There were five more stables to be searched. She shook herself and continued on. On the way to the third stable, Ani glanced around with a thought that Geric might be near and was stopped short by what she saw. No need to continue the search. There was her horse. In a far arena, she saw Falada. A stranger rode him, and Falada bucked.
She walked toward him. All around her were horsemen, stable-hands, guards, ladies walking with sunshades, pages. She did not meet their eyes and kept her head slightly bent to the weight of the shadow on her face. She could hear him neighing now, a savage sound she had never heard him utter before, and it made her stomach feel like a stone.
Falada, she said, what is wrong?
The rider held the reins tight to his mane. Falada’s neck was sweating, and his head was thrown up with wild eyes open to redness. He looked at Ani.
Ani reached the fence and stood beside it, hugging the wooden rail and calling to her horse.
“That cursed thing won’t break,” said a stable-hand.
The rider only grunted, working on getting the horse to make a circle, but Falada lunged as though he had never seen a rider, as though wearing the saddle were torture.
Calm, Falada, calm. They might hurt you if you do not tame.
The horse kept one ear pointed at her as he pounded to the far side of the corral, but he spoke no words. Ani’s head felt tight and heavy. She could not reason why he ignored her words. Or how he had forgotten how to hear them.
The rider was flung from the saddle, and he darted away from the stallion’s striking hooves. Ani slid between the fence rails and approached. Falada trotted to a halt and watched. Her hand was held out, her palm up.
Falada, remember? Do you remember me?
He snorted, and his eye roved like a tormented thing. She thought he wanted to speak, but no word entered her head.
Falada, friend, all is well. Peace. All is well.
The horse sniffed at her palm, and her hand trembled under his breath. She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and cry into his mane, as she had after finding her father prostrate under his horse, as she had when the mournful cries of Rianno-Hancery stripped away her vigor until she felt small and thin and unable to take another step after the funeral wagon. Who would comfort her at the loss of Falada? The thought broke into a sob, and she clenched her teeth and stepped closer in.
Easy, easy. She ran her hand slowly from his nose to his cheek and down his neck, hoping to awaken his old self with her touch. His skin shuddered under her hand. She held still, afraid to spook him. Peace, she said. No harm.
Falada jerked his head up, away from her hands, and rose on his hind legs and pawed the air. She jumped away as a hoof met her cheek. A pair of hands pulled her away and pushed her through a space in the fence.
“Get out of here, girl,” said the rider. “You’re wanting a knock on the head for acting like that.”
“I thought she had him for a minute,” said the stable-hand.
“What’s wrong with him?” said Ani. Her head throbbed. She watched Falada dance in the corral. The morning around him seemed to dim, and the sunlight on his white coat was so bright that it pierced her eyes until she had to look down.
“He’s got the animal dementia.” The rider waved her away. “None of your mind, so go on.”
Falada was pacing again, and foam hung from his jaw. Ani pressed her hand against her throbbing cheek. Her head felt as hollow as her chest.
Falada, she said.
“You, girl.”
Ani turned, expecting to see Ungolad or Terne, but was accosted instead by a palace attendant, who grabbed her elbow and walked her swiftly toward the palace. “Another lost suppli
cant? Moseying about the horse grounds like it was your own court.”
“I’m just—”
“Just lost,” he said. “I know, and I don’t care. Not allowed.” He shut his mouth and would say no more.
Ani nearly fell flat as she struggled to keep his pace and to loosen his grip on her arm. The speed and the pain made her angry. For trying to calm my own horse I’m treated like a criminal, she thought. Across the field, Ani spotted Hul and Terne in conference under a garden tree, and she stopped tugging at her captive arm and kept her head down.
The attendant left her in a small room and locked the door behind her. It seemed to be a cell for criminals—bare, empty, cold. A small window high on one wall threw a square of light onto the stone floor. Ani sat in that bit of sun in the middle of the room, wrapped her arms around herself, and cried silently for some time. She did not know if she shivered from the cold room or the sound of booted feet in the corridor. She jumped at every sound and waited for a guard to open the door. Her aching head did not allow her to think of Falada.
When she finally heard the noise of a key in the lock, Ani was so exhausted of being afraid that she barely made herself stand. She had followed the square of sunlight’s movements closer to the wall until it had disappeared with noon. She leaned against the wall and squinted in the half-light, waiting to make out Ungolad’s form in the opening door. It was a woman.
“Come on,” the woman said. Ani submitted her wrist to the attendant and was pulled up stairs and to a more decorous level. “I’d forgotten that man brought you in, it’s such a busy day, marketday and all, but the king usually sits in judgment today, so let’s see if we can’t slip you in and out of our hair.”
They waited in a wood-paneled corridor that Ani guessed ran beside the king’s receiving chamber. She could hear the king’s large voice and the high tones of a supplicant, and for the first time that morning, Ani thought she might leave the palace alive.
