[Books of Bayern 1] The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale

Author:Shannon Hale [Hale, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction, Fiction, General, Fantasy & Magic, Fairy tales, Royalty, Fairy Tales; Folklore & Mythology, Princesses, Fairy Tales & Folklore, Human-animal communication
ISBN: 9781582349909
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Published: 2003-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

"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 his 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

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