Once there was a girl who looked after the geese for the queen. In the mornings she brought the geese out of their enclosure and let them run around the yard; in the afternoons she would herd them down to the royal pond and let them paddle in the water and eat the water plants. Before dinner, the queen would come to the pond and visit the geese, bringing them lettuce from the royal kitchens, which she fed to them, piece by piece, her royal gown dipping into the scummy pond water each time she bent forward with a morsel in her fingers.
The geese loved the queen. They loved her more than they loved the goose girl, the tender of their home and protector of their eggs. Each time the queen got up to leave, they would follow her back to the castle, a line of waddling white bodies that made the castle staff—and the townspeople, when they saw them—chuckle. The queen would let the geese trail her until she reached the castle door. Then she would turn and smile at them and tell them they could go no further.
“You belong in the pond,” she would say. “That is your table. You do not belong at mine.” Then she would close the castle door.
Each time this happened, the geese would wait in a cluster until the goose girl came to fetch them. She would coax them home with bread, even though the queen had forbidden this—Geese should eat roots and stems, she said, and she wasn’t wrong—and herd them back down to the pond and from there to their enclosure. It was the goose girl’s job to make sure the geese were safely tucked away at night so that the foxes wouldn’t eat them. Each night she walked the geese up into their coop—a larger, more elegant one than had been built for the chickens—and made sure they were settled in their nests before closing the coop door and locking it tight.
Every night, before she closed the door, the geese asked her the same question.
“Why can’t we eat at the queen’s table?” they said. “Why won’t she have us, if indeed she loves us so?”
“The queen eats bread,” the goose girl told them. “And bread is not good for you.”
“But you feed us bread,” the geese retorted.
“I feed you bread only when you will not listen,” the goose girl said. “If you come with me when I tell you to, I will not feed you bread anymore.”
The oldest of the geese was a matriarch named Dorrie. When she heard this from the goose girl, she shook her head. “But if you give us bread until we listen,” she said, “then what’s to stop us from ignoring you all of the time? You are the goose girl, but you make no sense. Why should we listen to you at all?”
“Who keeps you safe?” The goose girl was growing annoyed. “Who takes you out into the sun each day, and brings you down to the pond so you can splash in the water and attend on the queen? Who makes sure that you’re protected from the foxes? You are ungrateful, goose, and it is very unbecoming.”
“I am not ungrateful,” said Dorrie. “I want to know why I am not good enough for the queen’s table when the queen’s royal gown is good enough for my pond.”
The goose girl looked at Dorrie, then sighed. “Only the queen can tell you that,” she said. “Would you like to ask her yourself?”
“Yes,” Dorrie said. “I would.”
The goose girl made sure that the rest of the geese were locked safely in the coop, and then took Dorrie back to the castle. When the soldier at the door saw Dorrie, he shook his head and refused to let them enter. In response, Dorrie reared up and beat her wings in the air. She was the largest of the geese, and her wings stretched six feet from tip to tip. She beat the guard over the head so hard that he fell; when other guards came running, Dorrie squawked so loud the entire castle heard her.
“Let her in!” the goose girl shouted, and this time the guards obeyed.
When they got to the dining hall, the queen was already standing.
“Dorrie,” she said, in her most regal voice. “Dorrie, what’s all this?”
“I want to sit at your table,” Dorrie said.
“Silly goose,” the queen said. “Geese do not sit at my table—that’s why you have a pond.”
“The world is larger than my pond!” Dorrie cried. “The world is larger than my coop, than the yard, and larger even than your castle. I am not a silly goose.”
The queen looked down at Dorrie, then sighed. “Very well. Come here, Dorrie, and sit down.” She pulled a great chair out from the table and motioned for Dorrie to take it. Dorrie climbed in without difficulty. She wrapped her wings around the silver fork and knife at her place and looked up at the queen.
“That is better,” she said. “Where is the bread?”
“There is no bread,” the queen said. “We are having goose for dinner.” Then she slit Dorrie’s throat with the knife she’d been hiding up her sleeve. Dorrie could do nothing except watch her blood spill out onto the tablecloth. When her eyes finally closed, the queen nodded to her servants.
“Clean that up,” she said. Then she went back to her meal.
The goose girl, unnoticed, slipped out of the dining hall and away from the castle. She crept into the farmyard and unlocked the coop and brought the geese out, one by one, and told them what had happened to Dorrie.
“I won’t feed you bread anymore,” she said. “The world is much larger than bread, and far more delicious. You deserve to know that for yourselves.”
Then the goose girl and her geese took leave from the kingdom, and were not heard from again.