[Books of Bayern 1] The Goose Girl (21 page)

"What's the matter?" he said.

"Geric, can you save the horse?"

"Isi, the king's issued the order. It may've already been done."

Ani stared up at the baring branches, eyes wide to keep them dry. She felt powerless.

Geric looked at her with sympathy, perhaps thinking she was just a sweet girl who hated to hear of the mistreatment of any animal. She shook her head, unable to explain.

"Please," she said. "Can you just ask the prince if he'll let him live? It's very important to me. That horse doesn't deserve to die."

"I'll try," he said. "If you'd like, I'll go right now and try."

"Thank you. I wouldn't ask something like this, but I feel like you're a friend, a good friend."

"Isi, I'm so glad I am. These afternoons have been, you know, so nice. More than nice.

More than just getting to eat out here and know your geese and talk. It's not like—the palace—it isn't an easy place to be, especially not now, and I'm trying to say that you've been. . . no, you're so, you're—"

He stopped. Looking into his dark eyes was like gazing at a calm river, and in them she saw the reflection of the leaning trees behind her, of golden leaves, of herself crowned by autumn. She lifted her face to him and was aware of the fullness of the sun on her skin, breaking through the cold air. Geric touched her cheek, smooth as a teardrop, thrilling as a lightning storm. She felt real.

"You are," he said. His hand found hers, and he held her fingers tightly, as though he did not dare to do any more than hold her one hand, and look at her, and breathe deeply. She held his hand in both of hers.

With that touch his countenance changed. He dropped his hand and looked away.

"I should go," he said, already walking to his horse. She stayed by the stream. When he had mounted, he turned back and frowned.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry, Isi." He rode up the hill, through the arch, and disappeared into the stones of the city.

************************************

After the dark affirmed it was the middle night, Ani left Jok dozing on her bed, wrapped her hair into Gilsa's blue headscarf, and slipped outside. She had recently oiled the hinge of her door, and it closed silently behind her. It was a long walk to the palace and seemed longer after dark, with nothing to watch but stray cats and closed windows. With every step the cold of the cobblestones pushed up through her boot soles and into her bones. She was wearing Gilsa's pullover. It was bright and patterned, and she felt as obvious as a goose in a murder of crows.

The night guards stopped her at the gate. Of course they would.

"I've been called to the stables," she said. Her forehead itched with cold and sweat, but she did not raise her hand to it.

The lead guard looked her over and then motioned for her to pass. She was a girl, a Forest girl by the look of her head wrap, and not possibly important enough to lie or plot. Ani knew a trusting guard might let an innocuous girl enter alone, but leading a princely, maddened horse back through was another matter. But she had to try.

There were others on the stable grounds—guards, late workers, and sleepless stable-hands. She nodded to those she walked past, and they nodded back. The stable where she had last seen Falada lay at the end of the yard, a painfully long walk that stretched on and on, the distance seemingly unchanged with every step.

When at last she ducked through the fence posts and into the long building, Ani knew it was wrong. There was an odor of stale hay and muck piles without the sharp, warm smell of animal. She ran to the end. Every stall was empty. Ani wiped her forehead with a loose end of the scarf and took a bracing breath. She would have to check every stable. Like the cold, hopelessness pricked at her skin.

She crossed the arena and ducked through the railings. Something caught-—an exposed nail, a tether hook—and held a corner of her head wrap. Her fingers were numb from the cold, and she tried to feel it out blindly. Cloth, wood, metal, all felt the same.

"Ho there," said a stable-hand, "what're you doing?"

"I'm caught," she said.

"You shouldn't be here," he said.

Ani tugged harder. He spoke too loudly. Others were looking that way, and she was caught like a hooked fish breathing in cruel, dry air. And then she saw him. Across the field.

He had stopped and was looking at her, wondering at the commotion.

"You'd better leave," said the stable-hand.

Two pale braids. That was all she could make out at that distance. Pale braids. Panic seized her, and she had no thought but—away. She pulled herself free, and the scarf fell, long, unraveled, on the hard ground. Her yellow hair shone like silver in the moon-lightened field. All she knew to do then was run.

Ani did not look back. She knew he was behind her. She knew he was stronger, and she was so cold. Her boots hit the ground, and the impact shook her body, but her feet could feel nothing. She was as numb as her fingers, as numb as fear had made her mind. She stumbled and ran. He would be close now. Right there, behind her. Close enough to reach out, to grab her by the neck, to bring her down like a fox on a hen, jaw tight on its throat.

There's something I can do,
Ani thought.
There's something.
She could not think what. The wind from her running grabbed at her ears like a child anxious to tell secrets. She strained to understand, but it was just noise, like the chattering of the geese had been all those weeks ago.

Up ahead the guards at the side gate blocked the exit, and another hurried from his post toward the sounds of running.

"That man," she said as soon as she was close enough to speak, "he's trying to hurt me.

Please."

The guards turned their attention away from her, and she continued to run, at last outside the palace and into the dark of the sleeping city. She turned back to see Ungolad at the gate and heard him yell in outrage, his pursuit stopped by the warning of javelins pointed at his chest.

Ani did not stop running until the leaning streets eased, and she looked around at unfamiliar buildings and knew she was lost. She rested against a house, her head on her trembling arm, and concentrated on breathing the cold air that stabbed at her throat and lungs like icy fingers. Ungolad knew she was there. They would search now for a Kildenrean girl with long yellow hair. There was fear again. Falada was gone, and all was wrong.

There had been something, an idea, a sensation, something she could have done, something that was stronger than the knife in his hand. Something in the wind. She could not remember, though she tried as she stumbled west on the sleepy streets, hiding behind barrels and piles of refuse when she heard footsteps behind her own, but seeing no one. She finally gained the city wall when the moon had set and followed the wall in utter darkness to her own room. At last, her own safe place.

Ani locked her door, fell on her bed, and was asleep at once. She did not wake until Conrad rapped on her door after breakfast.

************************************

Geric did not come that day. Ani waited for him to bring the news of the horse's death.

She could imagine how he would look, what he would say, how his gait would be slower, despondent, each foot reluctant to take a step, his eyes slow to meet her face. But they would meet her face, and he would take her hand again, and all would be well.

He did not come.

After the sun had started its long slope into the hollow of the western sky, Tatto passed through the archway. "I've got new boots," he said, explaining why he picked his way across the grass, carefully avoiding goose droppings. Ani watched with sleepy eyes and a resigned dread.

"I've been sent by my chamber-lord to deliver to you a message." Tatto spoke officially, raising one hand, palm upright, in a stiff gesture of oration.

"Yes, go on," said Ani. He was inclined toward dramatic pauses.

"Here," he said. "A letter from someone in the palace."

The parchment was sealed with a plain pool of wax. Ani broke it and read.

Isi,

Matters here are worse, and the prince needs me

at present. At any rate, I think I had better not return
to your pasture again. I do not know bow to write this.

You know, this is my fourth draft of this letter, and I
am determined to finish this one even though I will

sound like a right fool. So I will just say it. I cannot
love you as a man loves a woman. I am so sorry if I

have presumed what is not true or have taken liberties
with your sentiments. I hope you can forgive me.

Geric

A
postscript scratched at the bottom read, "I have failed you twice. The horse you had regard for was already taken away when I arrived yesterday."

Ani folded the letter and put it in her pocket. Tatto was watching her face. Curiously, Ani did not feel like crying, or running away, or sighing. Instead, she felt anger burst open inside her, an overripe fruit. She felt like picking up the fist-size rock that lay by her foot and throwing it, hard. She did. It made an unsatisfactory thump on the ground.

"Not good news," said Tatto.

"I should be used to it. But right now Id like all my troubles to stand in front of me in a straight line, and one by one I'd give each a black eye."

"Oh." Tatto stood by, waiting to see what she would do.

She kicked her beech tree. The trunk was as thick as two men, the smooth bark as hard as a city stone. She could not even make the branches shiver. She shouted and kicked it again as hard as she could, knowing she could not even dent the bark. She was reminded of one of her temper-prone ganders that had tried to attack a carthorse, only to get kicked by a rather large hoof.

Ani stopped and pressed her forehead on a branch in a kind of apology. The pressure of the tree on her face soothed her. She closed her eyes and thought she could hear a kind of breathing echoing all around her, from leafless branches and the thick trunk and below her feet. She opened her eyes and saw Tatto staring.

"You're angry," he said.

"I think so," she said with some satisfaction.

"I saw my ma do that once"—he pointed at the tree trunk—"but to a milk pail. Kicked and chased it clear across the yard, crushed it to a ball of metal. Really."

"Yes, well. . . " Ani looked off to where some geese paddled on the pond, though the water was near freezing.
I cannot love you as a man loves a woman.
Her heart twisted at that.
And not coming back,
she thought.
Put him away, with the others who will not come
back. Aunt, father, Selia, brothers, sisters, Talone, the guards, Falada. Put Falada away.

"Tatto, do you know where they sent the princess's horse?"

"Yes, the knacker two over east from your pens."

Ani thanked him, and when Tatto had left, she told the geese to stay put. She found the knacker's yard first by smell. The place reeked of discarded parts of animals—an odor sour and mean that lodged in her throat. Bits of coarse hair and feathers tossed around on a ground breeze and lay on the dirt thick as dust on a floor unused. A man in a heavy apron was sharpening his ax on a whetstone, even as she had imagined he would be.

"Sir," she said, "the white horse, the royal one, has he been killed?"

He looked up from his ax.

"Aye." He stepped forward. Clumps of animal hair stuck to his boots and to the dark stains on his apron.

"Yes," she said. "I thought so. Yesterday."

"A friend of yours, was he?" said the knacker, expecting her to laugh.

Ani winced. "Yes, actually. A good friend. But I've spent two months mourning and can't cry anymore."

"What are you, a misplaced stable-hand?"

"Goose girl," she said.

The knacker nodded and pumped the pedal of the whetstone.

"Sir, a favor," she said.

"Favor," he mumbled, and kept it spinning.

She removed the gold ring, the one Gilsa had refused, and held it out to him, letting the afternoon sunlight flicker on its edge like a halfhearted star.

"For payment, for a proper burial."

He looked up again and let the wheel spin down. Ani crossed the yard, conscious of the animal hair under her boots, and put it in his hand. His fingers were the dirty brown of unwashed blood. Ani swallowed at the touch. It could be Falada's blood.

"He was a noble beast and shouldn't die to be dog's meat. Give him the honorable rites due the mount of a princess."

The knacker stared at the circle of gold and shrugged. "All right." He gave the wheel another pump. "Do you want to see him?" The hand with the ring motioned to his right, and Ani noticed for the first time the hind leg of a white horse, the white hair stained all colors of brown from blood and dirt. It lay on the ground, severed from his body, being readied for dog meat. She took a step forward, her hand to her mouth. She saw the tip of another leg, the rest hidden by the hut.

"No," she said, "I've seen enough. I have to go." She turned her back and ran.

************************************

Four mornings later, Ani and Conrad herded their flock to the pasture, anxious to let them graze while the weather held clear and kept the winter rains and snows in abeyance. Ani liked to hurry into the sunshine of the pasture, not idling longer than needed in the shaded street.

That day, she stopped. Her eyes were drawn to the curve of wall above the arch. There, fastened to the stones, his neck attached to a round, polished board of dark wood, was the head of Falada. Ani grabbed at the stones in the wall to keep herself standing.

His mane was washed and combed straight down his disembodied neck. He was scrubbed clean of the blood of death and the mark of the ax. His head was imposing, bright white, nose pointed forward, like the proud carriage of a horse at a run. His eyes were glass balls, black as new moons.

"Look at him," said Conrad. He did not seem surprised.

"Why would they do that? Hang him there as they do the criminals?" She could not look away from the cold, glass eyes.