This story is based off the book Princess Academy by Shannon Hale. I do not own the plot, the characters, or anything else that you recognize.
Chapter One
The east says it's dawn
My mouth speaks a yawn
My bed clings to me and begs me to stay
I hear a work song
Say winter is long
I peel myself up and then make away
Bella woke to the sleepy bleating of a goat. The world was as dark as eyes closed, but perhaps the goats could smell dawn seeping through the cracks in the house's stone walls. Though still half asleep, she was aware of the late autumn chill hovering just outside her blanket, and she wanted to curl up tighter and sleep like a bear through frost and night and day.
The she remembered the traders, kicked off her blanket, and sat up. Her father believed today was the day their wagons would squeeze up the mountain pass and rumble into the village. This time of year, all the villagers felt the rush for the last trading of the season, to hurry and square off a few more linder blocks and make that much more trade, that much more to eat during the snow-locked months. Bella longed to help.
Wincing at the rustle of her pea-shuck mattress, Bella stood and stepped carefully over her pa and older sister, Renee, asleep on their pallets. For a week she had harbored an anxious hope to run to the quarry today and be already at work when her pa arrived. Perhaps then he might not send her away.
She pulled her wool leggings and shirt over her sleep clothes, but she had not yet laced her first boot when a crunch of pea-shucks told her that someone else had awakened.
Pa stirred the hearth embers and added goat dung. The orange light brightened, pushing his huge shadow against the wall.
"Is it morning?" Renee leaned up on one arm and squinted against the wall.
"Just for me," said their father.
He looked to where Bella stood, frozen, one foot in a boot, her hands on the laces.
"No," was all he said.
"Pa," Bella stuffed her other foot into its boot and went to him, laces trailing on the dirt floor. She kept her voice casual, as though the idea just occurred to her. "I thought that with the accidents and bad weather lately, you could use my help, just until the traders come."
Pa did not say no again, but she could see by the concentrated way he pulled on his boots that he meant it. From outside wafted one of the chanting songs the workers sang as they walked to the quarry. I hear a work song say winter is long. The sound came closer and with it an insistence that it was time to join in, hurry, hurry, before the workers passed by, before snow encased the mountain inside winter. The sound made Bella's heart feel squeezed between two stones. It was a unifying song and one she was not invited to join.
Embarrassed to have shown she wanted to go, Bella shrugged and said, "Oh well," She grabbed the last onion from a barrel, cut off a slice of brown goat cheese, and handed the food to her father as he opened the door.
"Thank you, my flower. If the traders come today, make me proud." He kissed the top of her head and was singing with the others before he reached them.
Her throat burned. She would make him proud.
Renee helped Bella do the inside chores – sweeping the hearth and banking the coals, adding more water to the salt pork soaking for dinner. As Renee sang, Bella chattered about nothing, never mentioning their pa's refusal to let her work. But gloom hung heavy on her like wet clothes, and she wanted to laugh and shake it off.
"Last week I was passing by Kate's house," said Bella, "and her ancient grandfather was sitting outside. I was watching him, amazed that he didn't seem bothered by a fly that was buzzing around his face, when, smack. He squashed it right against his mouth."
Renee cringed.
"But Renee, he left it there," said Bella. "This dead fly stuck just under his nose. And when he saw me, he said 'Good evening, miss,' and the fly…" Bella's stomach cramped from trying to speak through a laugh. "The fly wobbled when he moved his mouth… and… and just then its little crushed wing lifted straight up, as if it were waving hello to me, too!"
Renee always said that she could not resist Bella's low, throaty laugh and defied the mountain itself not to rumble as well. But Bella liked her sister's laugh better then a bellyful of soup. At the sound, he heart felt lighter.
They chased the goats out of the house and milked the nannies in the tight chill of morning. It was cold on top of their mountain in anticipation of winter, but the air was loosened by a breeze coming up from the valley. The sky changed from pink to yellow to blue with the rising sun, but Bella's attention kept shifting to the west and the road from the lowlands.
"I've decided to trade with Aro again," said Bella, "and I'm set in wrestling something extra out of him. Wouldn't that be a feat?"
Renee smiled, humming. Bella recognized the tune as one the quarry workers sang when dragging stones out of the pit. Singing helped them to tug in rhythm.
"Maybe extra barley of salt fish," said Bella.
"Or honey," said Renee.
"Even better." Her mouth watered at the thought of hot sweet cakes, honeyed nuts for a holiday, and a bit saved to drizzle on biscuits some bleak winter evening.
At her pa's request, Bella had taken charge of trading for the past three years. This year, she was determined to get that stingy lowlander trader to give up more then he had intended. She imagined the quiet smile on Pa's face when she told him what she had done.
"I can't help wondering," said Renee, holding the head of a particularly grumpy goat while Bella did the milking. "after you left, how long did the fly remain?"
At noon, Renee left to help in the quarry. Bella never spoke about this daily moment when Renee went and Bella stayed behind. She would never tell how small and ugly she felt. Let them all believe I don't care, thought Bella. Because I don't care. I don't.
When Bella was eight years old, all the other children her age had started to work in the quarry – carrying water, fetching tools, and performing other basic tasks. When she asked her Pa why she could not, he had held her in his arms, kissed the top of her head, and rocked her with such love, she knew she would leap across the mountaintops of he asked it. Then in his mild, low voice, he had said, "You are never to set foot in the quarry, my flower."
She had not asked him why again. Bella had been tiny from birth and at age fourteen was smaller then girls years younger. There was a saying in the village that when something was thought to be useless it was "Skinnier than a lowlander's arm." Whenever Bella heard it she wanted to dig a hole in the rocks and crawl deep and out of sight.
"Useless," she said with a laugh. It still stung, but she liked to pretend, even to herself, that she did not care. Bella led the goats up a slope behind their house to the only patches of grass still long. By winter, the village goats worked the hilltop grasses down to stubble. IN the village itself, no green things grew. Rock debris was strewn and stacked and piled deeper the Bella could dig, and scree lettered the slopes that touched the village lanes. It was the cost of living beside a quarry. Bella heard the lowlander traders complain, but she was accustomed to heaps of rock chipping underfoot, fine white dust in the air, and mallets beating out the sound of the mountains heartbeat.
Linder. It was the mountain's only crop, her village's one mean of livelihood. Over centuries, whenever one quarry ran out of linder, the villagers dug a new one, moving the village of Mount Eskel into the old quarry. Each of the mountain's quarries had produced slight variationson the brilliant white stone. They had mined linder marbled with pale veins of pink, blue, green, and now silver.
Bella tethered the goats to a twisted tree, sat on the shorn grass, and plucked one of the tiny blue floers that bloomed out of cracks in the rocks. A blue bell flower.
The linder of the current quarry had been uncovered the day she was born, and her father had wanted to name her after the stone.
"This bed of linder is the most beautiful yet," he had told her mother, "pure white with streaks of silver."
But in the story that Bella had pulled out of her father many times, her mother had refused. "I don't want a daughter named after a stone," she had said, choosing instead to name her Bella after the blue bell flowers that conquered rock and climbed to face the sun.
Pa had said that despite the pain and weakness after giving birth, her mother would not let her go of her tiny baby. A week later, her mother had died. Though Bella had no memory of it save what she had created in her imagination, she thought of that week when she was held by her mother as the most precious thing she owned, and she kept the idea of it tight to her heart.
Bella twirled the flower between her fingers, and the thin petals snapped off and dropped into the breeze. Folk wisdom said she could make a wish if all the petals fell in one twirl.
What could she wish for?
She looked to the east, where yellow green slopes and flat places of Mount Eskel climbed into the gray blue peak. To the north, a chain of mountains bounded away into forever – purple, blue, then gray. She could not see the horizon to the south, where somewhere an ocean unfolded, mysterious. To the west was the trader road that led to the pass and eventually to the lowlands and the rest of the kingdom. She could not imagine life in the lowlands and more than she could visualize an ocean.
Below her, the quarry was a jangle of odd rectangular shapes, blocks half exposed, men and women working with wedges and mallets to fee chunks from the mountain, levers to lift them out, and chisels to square them straight. Even from her hilltop, Bella could hear the chanting songs in the rhythms of the mallet, chisel, and lever, the sounds overlapping, the vibrations stirring the ground where she sat.
A tingle in her mind and a sense of Esme, one of the quarrywomen, came with the faint command Lighten the blow. Quarry-speech. Bella leaned forward at the feel of it, wanting to hear more.
The workers used this way of talking without speaking aloud so they could be heard dispite the clay plugs they wore in their ears and the deafening blows of mallets. The voice of quarry-speech worked only in the quarry itself, but Bella could sometimes sense the echoes when she sat nearby. She did not understand how it worked exactly but had heard a quarry worker say that all their pounding and singing stored up rhythm in the mountain. Then, when they needed to speak to another person, the mountain used the rhythm to carry the message for them. Just now, Esme must have been telling another quarrier to lighten his strike on a wedge
How wonderful it would be, Bella thought, to sing in time, to call out in quarry-speech to a friend working on another ledge. To share in the work.
The blue bell step began to go limp in her fingers. What could she wish for? To be as tall as a tree, to have arms like her pa, to have an ear to her the linder ripe for the harvest and the power to pull it loose. But wishing for impossible things seemed an insult to the blue bell flower and a slight against the god who made it. For amusement she filled herself with impossible wishes – her ma alive again, boots no rock shards could poke through, honey instead of snow. To somehow be as useful to the village as her own pa.
A frantic bleating pulled her attention to the base of her slope. A boy of fifteen pursued a loose goat through the knee-deep stream. He was tall and lean, with a head of bronze curls and limbs still brown from the summer sun. Edward. Normally she would shout hello, but over the past year a strange feeling had come from Bella, and now she was more likely to hide from him then flick pebbles at his backside.
She had begun to notice things about him lately, like the pale hair on his tanned arm and the line between his brows that deepened when he was perplexed, She liked those things.
It made her wonder of he noticed her, too.
She looked from the bald head of the blue bell flower down to Edwards bronze hair and wanted something that she was afraid to speak.
"I wish…," she whispered. Did she dare?
"I wish that Edward and I-"
A horn blast echoed so suddenly against the cliffs that Bella dropped the flower stem. The village did not have a horn, so that meant lowlanders. She hated to respond to the lowlander's trumpet like an animal to a whistle, but curiosity overcame her pride. She grabbed the tethers and wrestled the goats down the slope.
"Bella!" Edward jogged beside her, pulling his goats after him. She hoped her face was not smudged with dirt.
"Hello, Edward. Why aren't you in the quarry?" In most families, care of the goats and rabbits was performed only by those too young or too old to work in the quarry.
"My sister wanted to learn wedge work and my grandmother was feeling sore in the bones, so my ma asked me to take a turn with the goats. Do you know what the trumpeting is about?"
"Traders, I guess. But why the fanfare?"
"You know lowlanders," said Edward. "They're so important."
"Maybe one had some gas, and they trumpeted so the whole world would know the good news."
He smiled in his way, with the right side of his mouth pulling higher then the left. Their goats were bleating at one another like little children arguing.
"Oh, really, is that so?" Bella asked the lead goat as if she understood their talk.
"What?" said Edward.
"Your nanny there said that stream was so cold it scared the milk right up into her mutton chops."
Edward laughed, stirring in her a desire to say something more, something clever and wonderful, but the wanting startled her thoughts away, so she clamped her mouth shut before she said something stupid.
The stopped at Bella's house to tie up the goats. Edward tried to help by taking all the tethers, but the goats started to butt one another, the leads tangled, and suddenly, Edward's ankles were bound.
"Wait… stop," he said, and fell flat to the ground.
Bella stepped in to try to help and soon found herself sprawled beside him, laughing. "We're cooked in a goat stew. There's no saving us now."
When they were finally untangled and standing upright, Bella had an impulse to lean forward and kiss his cheek. The urge shocked her, and she stood there, dumb and embarrassed.
"That was a mess," he said.
"Yes." Bella looked down, brushing the dirt and gravel from her clothes. She decided she had better tease him quickly in case he had read her thoughts. "If there's one thing you're good at, Edward Cullen, it's making a mess."
"That's what my ma always says, and everyone knows she's never wrong."
Bella realized that the quarry was silent and the only pounding she heard was her own heartbeat in her ears. She hoped Edward could not hear it. Another trumpet blare roused them to urgency, and they set off running.
The trader wagons were lined up in the village center, waiting for business to begin, but all eyes were on a painted blue carriage that rolled into their midst. Bella had heard of carriages but never seen one before. Someone important must have come with the traders.
"Edward, lets watch from-" Bella started to say, but just then Kate and Tanya shouted Edward's name and waved him over. Kate was as tall as Edward, with her hair browner then Bella's that hit her waist when loose, and Tanya, with her large eyes was acknowledged the prettiest girl in the village. They were two years older then Edward, but lately he was the boy they most liked to smile at.
"Let's watch with them," said Edward, waving, his smile suddenly shy.
Bella shrugged. "Go ahead." She ran the other way, weaving through the crowd of waiting quarry workers to find Renee, and did not look back.
"Who do you think it could be?" asked Renee, stepping closer to Bella as soon as she approached. Even in a large group, Renee felt anxious standing alone.
"I don't know," said Angela, "but my ma says a surprise from a lowlander is a snake in a box."
Angela was slender, though not as small as Bella, and shared the same bronze hair with her brother, Edward. She was eyeing the wagon, her face scrunched suspiciously. Renee nodded. Esme, Angela and Edward's mother, was know for her wise sayings.
"A surprise," said Carmen. She had shoulder-length black hair and an expression of near constant wonderment. Though only sixteen, she was nearly as broad-shouldered and thick armed as any of her six big brothers. "Who could it be? Some rich trader?"
One of the traders looked their way with a patronizing smile. "Clearly it's a messenger from the king."
"The king?" Bella felt herself gawk like a coarse mountain girl, but she could not help it. No one from the king had been to the mountain in her lifetime.
"They're probably here to declare Mount Eskel the new capital of Danland," said the trader.
"The royal palace will fit nicely in the quarry," said the second trader.
"Really?" Carmen asked, and both traders snickered. Bella glared at them but did not speak up, afraid of sounding ignorant herself.
Another trumpet blared, and a brightly dressed man stood on the drivers bench and yelled in a high strained voice, "I call you ears to hearken the chief delegate of Danland."
A delicate man with a short, pointed beard emerged from the carriage, squinting in the sunlight that reflected off the white walls of the old quarry. As he took in the sight of the crowd, his squint became a pronounced frown.
"Lords and ladies of…" He stopped and laughed, sharing some private joke with himself. "People of Mount Eskel. As your territory has no delegate at court to report to you, His Majesty the king sent me to deliver you this news." A breeze tapped his hat's long yellow feather against his brow. He pushed it away. Some of the younger village boys laughed.
"This past summer, the priests of the creator god took council on the birthday of the prince. They read the omens and divined the home of his future bride. All the signs indicate Mount Eskel."
The chief delegate paused, seemingly waiting for a response, though what kind, Bella had no notion. A cheer? A boo? He sighed, and his voice went higher.
"Are you so remote that you don't know the customs of your own people?"
Bella wished that she could just shout out the right answer, but like her neighbors, she was silent.
A few traders chuckled.
"This has long been a Danlander custom," said the chief delegate, pushing the wind-beaten feather away from his face. "After days of fasting and supplication, the priests perform a rite to divine which city or town is the home of the future princess. Then the prince meets all the noble daughters of that place and chooses his bride. You may be certain that the pronouncement of Mount Eskel shocked many Danlanders, but who are we to argue with the priests of the creator god?"
From the tightness of his tone, Bella guessed that he had indeed tried to argue with the priests of the creator god and failed.
"As is tradition, the king commands an academy be formed for the purpose of preparing the potential young ladies. Though law dictates the academy be formed in the chosen town, your village does not" -he squinted and looked around- "indeed, does not have any buildings of appropriate size for such an undertaking. Given these circumstances, the priests agreed the academy could be lodged in the old stone minister's house near the mountain pass. The king's servants are even now preparing it for use." The wind tapped the feather on his cheek. He swatted it like a bee.
"On the morrow, all the girls in this village aged twelve to seventeen are ordered to the academy to prepare themselves to meet the prince. One year from now the prince will ascend the mountain and attend the academy's ball. He himself will select his bride from among the girls of the academy. So let you prepare."
The updraft thrust the feather into his eyes. He tore it from his hat and threw it at the ground, but the wind snatched it up and sent it flying out from the village, over the cliff, and away. The chief delegate was back in his carriage before the feather was out of sight.
"Snake in a box," said Bella