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

the camp. I alone added a branch to the fire and sat beside her. Ani looked down at her shaking hands.
    "Princess, is something wrong?"
    She set her brush on the log and folded her hands. "I'm all right." She had never felt before that someone could hurt her—and enjoy it. That new awareness made her look at Talone with suspicion. He had assigned Ishta to her watch. Had he known? Could she trust him? Who could guard her from her guards?
    Ani made her way to her tent, feeling blindly with her slippered toes for rocks and shooting roots. Selia was readying her own bedroll beside the tent. Her wet hair was lumi-nescent in the near dark.
    Ani sat on a corner of Selia's blanket, held her knees against her chest, and hoped for conversation. Something just happened, she wanted to say. There was something strange, and I wanted to tell you, she would say, if Selia seemed in a mood to talk, like they used to do for hours on her balcony, Selia brushing oils through her long hair and relating gossip that had slipped up the stairs from the kitchen or out of the idle mouths of waiting ladies, their promises of secrecy dulled by the tedium of embroidery. Ani longed now for such an hour, the comfort of casual talk and a warm blanket around her shoulders to hold off the heavy blackness of so much space at their backs. She waited for Selia, who liked to start conversations on her own terms. Selia finished with her bedroll. She stood by her pillow and said nothing.
    "How was your bath?" said Ani.
    "Cold."
    "Oh. I'm thoughtless, Selia. Of course you should bathe in camp in warm water."
    "You mean in your used, tepid bathwater? For who is to heat water for the lady-in-waiting? No, thank you, I would rather use the stream."
    "Selia, are you angry?"
    Selia turned to her, and in the dark of a night before the moon and too far from the fire, all Ani could see was the pale outline of her cheek and the glint of one eye.
    "No, of course not, Crown Princess," said Selia. Her voice was ordinary again, a lilting tone, pleasing and artless.
    "Once we get to Bayern," said Ani, "there will, thankfully, be hot water and beds again."
    "A very apt observation, Crown Princess." Her voice was still even and polite. "Yet I believe in Bayern there will be much more waiting for me than just water and goose feathers."
    "What do you mean?"
    Selia did not answer. Someone added wood to the fire, and in the sudden flush of light she could see Selia's face. She was looking across the camp. Ani turned. Ungolad stood by the fire. His eyes were on Ani. He smiled a closed smile, not showing any teeth.

    Chapter 4

    he first four weeks of forest travel had merged into one another in the perpetual landscape of firs and pines. Despite the tension, Ani found she enjoyed the journey.
    A breeze moved across her face, and she fancied it was the breeze of the trees' breathing, the pines on either side inhaling and exhaling across the road.
    "The tales that trees could tell, the stories wind would sing," Ani said to herself. It was a piece from a rhyme, one that as a child she had begged the nurse-marys to sing. It had filled her with wonder and mystery and made her want to throw off her shoes and hat and run to meet the wildness just outside the closed panes. Her aunt had once spoken of the knowledge of speaking not with animals, but with the elements of nature. And she thought of the story of her birth, how she had not opened her eyes for three days. Her aunt had said she was born with a first word on her tongue and would not wake for trying to taste it. What word? she wondered.
    The stories wind would sing. Just then, she could not think of the rest of the rhyme.
    Ani noticed Talone scanning the roadside for a marker and trotted up to join him.
    "There will be a notched tree on the right hand to mark halfway, Princess," he said. "Or so the last trader we passed informed me. We are at a disadvantage here, none of us having ridden this road. Except Ungolad."
    "Can you tell me about