--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl
“I still have no use for either; it seems to me that the combination of great beauty and great wealth is a monstrous cruel handicap for a girl who simply wants to tend to her own affairs and her own Geese. In the future I shall know precisely what to do if another old beggar woman comes pestering me for a bite to eat while I’m herding my Geese in the high meadow. Will I give her my last crust of bread, like the softhearted, simpleminded dunderpate that I am? No I will not; I’ll send her away with a flea in her ear, that’s what I’ll do. ‘Tis said that no good deed ever goes unpunished, and so I am learning to my sorrow.”
--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl
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“I have been considering my fate, and the way it appears to me is this: if I agree to marry the Prince, who is young and handsome and somewhat less intelligent than a clod of dirt, he may perchance let me out of this tower before the wedding takes place. ‘Twould not occur to him that I might run away when once I had given my word. Which I would do, I assure you, in the winking of an eye. On the other hand, if I do agree to marry the Prince, the King will simply have the Prince quietly assassinated, and I will end up marrying the King anyway. He would never risk losing anything he wanted through foolish trust in a woman’s word. No indeed; I shall be treated like the wife of Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater, who kept his poor lady in a pumpkin shell, and most uncomfortable that must have been. I daresay I’ll be walled up in some tower or another until the day I die, which could turn out to be a great deal sooner than I might otherwise have expected. If I agree to marry the King from the first, why then, the Prince is less likely to find a knife between his ribs, which I recognize is a much happier outcome for the Prince. Yet look at what I am left with: the old sinner with the concealed weapons and a smile that makes you wonder how, precisely, his first two wives died.”
--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl “The King and the Prince, I must tell you, are both courting me. They each swear to be sick with love-longing for me, and so they may be for aught I know. I am of the opinion, however, that the sacks of diamonds and gold dust under my bed are as bewitching as my more personal attractions.”
--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl “The King killed my canary today. Now, I know full well that the customary way to begin such a tale as mine is: ‘Once upon a time, when wishes still came true, there lived a poor orphan Goose Girl,’ or some such fiddle-faddle. But what do I care for custom? ‘Tis my own story I am telling and I will tell it as I please. And as I find myself plunged into it right up to the neck, I see no reason why you should not be also. I resume. The King killed my canary today.”
--Goose Girl by Patrice Kindl |