by Shannon Hale
The man listened calmly to Yulan, then looked to Ani and waited for her to speak.
In her truest Bayern accent, she said, “They’ve a knife to my back.”
The four men acted instantly. In a moment she was loosed from Yulan’s and Ishta’s hands and placed in the center of the peace-keepers.
“You have no right,” said Yulan. His face was red, and he sheathed his dagger with an angry thrust. “This is royal business. We have fair claim here.” He drew from his chest an official-looking parchment with the yellow, blue, and red Bayern symbol blazoned at the top.
“She’s bleeding, Aldric,” said one of the peace-keepers.
Ani pressed her hand to where she could still feel the biting sensation of the dagger and brought it back marked by blood. There was a stir among the men. Ani thought they had communicated an anger among themselves that she could feel pulsating around her, hot as walking out of summer shade.
“Since when,” said one, “do Kildenrean yellow boys have the right to cut Bayern women?”
Yulan shook his document in the air. Aldric, the lead peace-keeper, knocked Yulan’s hand with the tip of his staff, and the paper fell to the ground.
“Fortunately,” said Aldric, “we’re not royal guards. They do less to protect our women than a garbage cat. And we don’t buy for tin your fine order. We’re out here to keep the peace. Keep it or get knocked.”
“You’re done here,” said another to Ani, and he touched her shoulder with a finger.
“Thank you,” said Ani. She knew they heard her, but they kept their eyes on the foreigners.
Enna took Ani’s hand and they ran across the street. Ani stopped to look back just to see Yulan, trembling from rage, free his long dagger and jump at Aldric. His blade never reached flesh, and his head met the quick end of a practiced quarterstaff—a deathblow. When Yulan crumpled to the ground, Ishta had already fled.
That night at the hall, the workers were hushed and eager, listening with chins in hands and bodies leaning forward. The goose girl had been seized by men at the festival and dragged up the street toward what unknown doom. The goose girl had refused to be forced, and Enna had brought help and freed her. Enna told her story, and Ani spoke as much of her version as she could, leaving out the pigeons and the reasons. They called for the story again. She gave it while holding a wet pack of herbs to the shallow cut in her back—Ideca’s orders, to help speed the healing.
“No telling where that scoundrel’s nasty blade had been,” said Ideca. She clucked over Ani’s blue dress, mending the slash with tight, quick stitches and cursing yellow foreigners with pleasant enthusiasm. Her mood came so close to cheery that the workers nearest her watched her as though she were an unpredictable animal.
“It’s Enna who called the peace-keepers,” said Ani.
They patted Enna’s back and tossed her an extra raisin bun, but it was Ani who received a kind of awed regard for the story. A person who had been worth abducting, and been bruised and scarred, but struggled and was saved. They spoke the title of goose girl with a trace of respect.
Chapter 15
Winter days were short, spent cleaning goose pens, hauling grains, changing water, and clearing the streets of snow on days when the sky let loose its winter passion before settling into placid frigidity. Evenings, Ani roasted nuts, cheese, or pigskin by the hall fire and learned to play sticks and tell-your-neighbor. This feels like a family, Ani thought. The cold outside and the warm inside. The usual food on the table, the same jests repeated, and conversation as familiar as looking down at her own hands.
When Ani beat Razo at sticks for the first time, all the watchers cheered, Ani raised her hands and cheered, too, and laughed so freely that her loneliness broke and fell away as though she had never felt it.
Ani told them stories at night, of mother’s blood turning children into warriors and mother’s love keeping babies tight in lockets, and when she told the stories she no longer visualized her own mother, but thought of Gilsa and the mothers of the workers, and the stories gained new truth and strength.
Then, when the mood quieted into watching the flames repeat themselves along the hearth log and into singing Forest songs that made everyone wistful and hushed, Ani wandered to the window. She saw herself caught in the mirror that the candle and firelight made of the pane. She bent closer and saw the depth behind the pane, that when she shielded the indoor light with her hands and pressed her forehead against the icy glass, the world outside melted from black shadow to blue stone. Night blue cobblestones and stone houses and the high stone wall. The dark blue sky smooth as a river stone. Something was moving there.
She had begun to feel it more profoundly since winter came. The cold deadened the world—froze stones, emptied streets, buried the pasture, and iced the stream. The bare trees stood against the whiteness like rigid ink strokes reaching upward to the dimmed, gray paper sky. In all that stillness there was space to feel that something else moved, something that had eluded her in the busyness of summer and autumn. It was out there, across the stream, or deep beneath her feet, or in her chest. She could not give it a name.
One evening the feeling haunted her. She stood by the window in the hall, listening, sure that if she concentrated harder, she could understand. It was the same feeling that had told her she could do something more when she fled from Ungolad at the palace, and again when Yulan’s knife drove her up the street. She wrapped her neck with a borrowed scarf and left the hall.
Ani walked quickly. There was a breeze, and it nipped at her ears and bit at the exposed skin of her wrists and face as though trying to get in. The sudden cold dulled her, and she no longer felt the pulling, but she knew where she was going.
Falada’s head was a lighter shape against the dark wall. The moon was low, but its light rarely reached that sinking corner of the city. Ani looked up.
Falada, she said.
She thought of the first time she had heard that name, bleated from the small mouth of a wet, gangly, beautiful colt. He had been born with his own name on his tongue.
Falada, she said.
She remembered her aunt saying Ani had been born with the first word of a language on her own tongue and did not open her eyes for three days with the effort of trying to taste it. Her aunt had sung her a song of waiting so that she would open her eyes and be patient until the day she could learn that new tongue. Remembering that promise awoke anew the desire to discover it at last.
Falada, she said.
She remembered the last word Falada had spoken to her, in the forest, when she had lost the handkerchief and turned her back to the river. Princess, he had said. He had always called her Princess. She missed him sorely and strained to hear him again, not with her ears, but with that part of her inside where his voice had always come, and from where she had been able to respond.
Falada, she said.
And because she was straining, she heard the brush of that final word again.
Princess.
The resonance of Falada’s voice came softly, an echo of what was once spoken, like the voice of the sea from a shell. They faced each other thus in silent conversation, the shivering once princess and the mounted head of her steed, dead speaking with dead.
A breeze wound up her skirt, touched her cheek, and chilled her where tears had left wetness. Ani wiped her cheeks and reached for a second time with her mind to hear herself named, yearning for the comfort of Falada’s voice.
Falada, she said.
Princess.
Ani started. She had been expecting to hear that word, but this time the tone did not carry the distant echo of Falada. A new voice.
She struggled to hear once more.
The winter breeze still brushed against her cheek, and again she heard her name—Princess—and what had laid on her tongue since the morning of her birth now loosened.
Ani pulled her scarf tighter and shivered. It is true after all. Even the wind has a language.
The voice of the wi
nd entered that same place inside her where she had always heard Falada’s, though its tones were unlike. It was an icy finger of thought, a rush of words that expected no response, as indifferent to her as to a tree. It was beautiful. There in the cold, blue shadow of winter night, Ani cried for Falada, and for the beauty of the language of the wind, and for the reminder of who she was.
Princess. Ani felt the wind and heard it identify her again. Then it lifted from her skin and slipped through the gate and out into the open pasture.
Ani returned every day. Conrad thought she visited that spot to check if the snow ever lifted enough from the pasture to allow grazing for the geese. But she stood before that portal and never noticed the winter world that lay on the other side. She looked up, spoke her horse’s name, and strained to hear the response.
Falada.
Princess.
And when a breeze touched her skin, in place of the memory of Falada’s last word, she heard the wind call her Princess.
She longed to talk to Falada in truth, to tell him that she had been lost in the Forest and that she had not meant to leave him. That she had tried. She wanted to say that the guards had seen her, chased her across the palace grounds and once at a festival, but she had begged help from strangers and birds and from a friend, and been freed. Ani smiled to herself, remembering that Falada in life would not have concerned himself much about any of the doings of people. But he would have listened. And he would have flicked her with his tail and nibbled on her hair to cheer her up.
She wanted to tell him how his last word resonated from the dead, and when all living things were dimmed by winter, she was able to hear it, and hearing it again taught her how to hear the wind.
She wanted to ask him if horses understood the wind.
His glass eyes looked at nothing. His mane was stiff, glued by the knacker to sit perfectly smooth in wind or stillness. She knew he was gone, that what she heard was only an echo. But that echo had reminded her how to listen deeper than her bones, to listen for what no one else heard. And as the days passed, and she learned how to listen, when the wind touched her skin she began to hear much more than just her name.
It was a few weeks after wintermoon, and the days were beginning to stretch themselves out like a cat that is tired of sleeping. The sun burned holes into the frost and ice in a brief abeyance from winter, and for a few days the patches of gray winter grass livened into green. Conrad and Ani took advantage of the window of warmth and herded the geese into the pasture for the afternoon. The geese shook their feathers in the sun and ran from the arch to the pasture, waddling dangerously in their haste and honking that though winter was not over yet, at least there were green things to eat again. Ani turned to Conrad to laugh, but his expression muted her.
Conrad had been in a foul mood of late. One winter night he had told other workers, in mocking tones, how Ani believed she could speak to the geese. But instead of laughing at her, Enna and the other chicken-keepers began to ask her advice, and soon even Razo pleaded help with a naughty magpie who pestered his prize ram. Ani noticed now that whenever one of the keepers came to her with a question, Conrad sat back and watched her darkly.
“Don’t mind Conrad,” Enna had said. “Back home, he’s the youngest of seven kids. I suspect the geese’re all he’s ever had of his own and he’s jealous of you. He’s just a boy, and fifteen, and needs to grow up. Give him time.”
After the geese passed under the arch, Ani stopped and looked up. She spoke Falada’s name and received her own, and the wind that came up off the stream touched her. Stream, it spoke. Cold, ice, geese moving toward stream. Stones. Princess. She was filled with the haunting, wonderful mystery of its language, and she stood enthralled, sensing the words it spoke.
“The wind. I can hear, but I can’t speak.”
“What?” Conrad was watching her, his lips tucked out in a cautious frown.
Ani looked away self-consciously. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Who then? The horse head?”
She shrugged and passed through the gate. Conrad followed without a word. It was not unusual for Conrad to spend a day in silence, but that day he did not visit his friends in near pastures or wander into the wood. He was always nearby, watching. When the afternoon clouded over, he stood and began to herd the geese, then stopped.
“Why do I bother? They respond to you and your little noises like you’re their mother. You might as well gather your own little goslings.”
He took his staff and strode off toward the city.
Conrad continued to be sullen. On the days when sufficient sun broke through the winter sky to be out of doors, Conrad always sat close enough to the beech tree to stay in Ani’s view. Though she longed to listen to the wind and try to speak back, his stare stopped her.
“She’s not normal,” Ani heard Conrad say to Razo as she passed by his open door on the way to the hall. “She stands under that horse head like he’s looking at her, and it’s not that she’s so good with the geese, but she actually thinks she’s talking to them. Someone like that shouldn’t be allowed to keep the king’s geese.”
“Ah, sit on it, Conrad,” said Razo. “Everyone thinks you’re green because she’s a better goose-keeper than you.”
“I am not.” He sounded like a little boy on the brink of a tantrum.
The next morning dawned icy. Ani had taken her turn at the bathhouse the night before, and she woke shivering, her hair still wet on her pillow. She stayed in her room all morning, trying to comb out the coldness. When near-noon arrived with enough sun to take out the geese, Ani stuffed her damp locks into her hat and met Conrad.
She stood near her tree most of the day, walking in circles to warm her blood, listening to the wind as it spoke through the beech branches of cold that was still to come before the world brightened into spring.
Ani marveled at the words that she began to hear so clearly now. It was nothing like learning bird speech, listening to the sounds, watching the movements, and practicing again and again to get it just right. Not like horse speech, that came slowly and easily as the colt grew, words like a voice in her mind, clear as her own thoughts. The wind blew understanding. It spoke in images, repeating where it had been with each new touch. It required concentration to hear it and to untangle the images into meanings.
A breeze lifted up to the beech from the woods beyond the stream, rustling of evergreens, owls, and deer and a private spot not too distant where sunlight streaked through the trees. Ani shivered, threw a glance at Conrad, who sat on a stone glumly watching the clouds, and told the geese to stay by the pond. She hoped they would obey.
Ani hopped across a narrow waist of the stream and found the little space, a small room of warmth inside a birch copse. She sat on a rock, took off her hat, and let her hair fall loose. She scratched her head with a pleased scowl, closed her eyes, and let the sun soak up the dampness and cold, willing winter to drain out of her bones.
An errant breeze sneaked through the trees and touched her bare neck, whispering of what it had seen—a fox, a pine, a secret spring. Ani considered the breeze by her ear, then thought of her hair long and damp at her back and, with a sentiment, suggested it take that path.
Ani opened her eyes, her muscles tight in surprise and wonder. The breeze moved between her neck and her hair, wrapping itself around her locks like ivy on an oak and passing among the hairs delicately, lifting them one by one, blowing on a strand like a careful maid dusting. Ani felt the wetness loosened and taken into the air. She sat very still, afraid to think or move and lose the wonder. Somehow, she had spoken to the wind.
“Yellow girl.”
She stood and whirled around. Conrad was standing between the trees. His eyes were on her hair. With a start, she put a hand to her head and felt the hairs still tossed on the breeze, though the air around her was still.
“What are you?” he said.
Ani hurriedly wrapped her dried hair around her head and secured it with her hat. She
spoke silently to the breeze that still plucked at her hat ribbon, suggesting a new course for it to wander. It snaked down her arm and left the copse.
“The goose girl,” she said.
Conrad laughed. “You don’t come from here. You aren’t natural.”
“Conrad, don’t say anything to anyone about my hair. If you understood—”
“It’s not fair. They think you’re the queen of geese or something and I’m just a dumb boy who couldn’t do it by himself. But you’re not even one of us.”
He ran back to the pasture.
That night, a light snow fell. The mood in the hall was gloomy as the workers contemplated potatoes like warmed rocks, skimmed milk, and wrinkled, winter apples dry as cork. No cheese, no sugar for sweet breads, and no winter-moon to look forward to. The wind shook the windowpanes. Spring seemed as far away as the ocean.
The workers began to talk of home, exchanging stories of the hopelessness of pulling a livelihood out of the evergreens and ferns and spongy soil. There had been news of sick siblings last marketday. There were widowed mothers and widower fathers and donkeys too old to keep pulling a cart to market.
“My wages are a last chance,” said Razo, his head bowed as he contemplated the fleabites on his arm. “Of course, they have been now for three years.”
Some chuckled, nodding their heads.
“I make more chasing sheep,” said one boy, “than my da pulls in all year.”
“I think the marketgoers buy my ma’s weed hats out of pity.”
“I know about that. You’ve seen our family’s rugs.”
Bettin pulled chicken feathers from Enna’s hair. “One winter harder than this one, and they’ll have to leave the house and come to the city.”
All grew quiet at that. Images of the city passed as a collective thought, houses shoved in any corner, stories piled on top of wobbly stories, the whole place stinking and sweltering in the summer, children playing in the streets, splashing in downhill trickles of dirty water. Ani shuddered. The city was as beautiful as a birthday cake from afar. It was not so friendly when one was out of luck. She glanced out the window toward her little room. It had never felt like a home, but it felt safer than any place she had known.
