The Goose Girl at the Well

A princess set out on a long journey to marry a foreign prince, accompanied only by her loyal talking horse, Falada, and a single serving maid entrusted to attend her. Along the way, the maid, growing bold and resentful of her mistress's higher station, forced the princess through threats to swap clothes and identities entirely, then rode ahead herself to be received as the bride while the true princess, now dressed as a servant, was made to work as a lowly goose girl instead.

The false bride, fearing Falada might reveal the truth since horses were said sometimes to speak, had him slaughtered — but the princess, grieving, begged the palace butcher to at least nail the horse's head above a city gate she passed through daily with her geese. Each morning, she paused beneath it and murmured her sorrow, and Falada's head, still somehow able to speak, answered with quiet comfort each time, an old king's young goose-tending helper, Conrad, overhearing these strange exchanges with growing curiosity.

Conrad reported the odd conversations to the old king, who disguised himself and listened himself the next morning, hearing enough of her genuine grief and the truth of her royal birth to grow suspicious of the entire arrangement. Gently pressed in private, unable to break an earlier forced oath of silence directly, the true princess found a way to tell her whole story instead to an iron stove, not realizing the old king was listening just outside — and the deception, once exposed, was swiftly undone: the false bride was punished for her cruelty, and the true princess was restored to her rightful place beside the prince, her patient honesty even in servant's rags having quietly outlasted a lie built on stolen appearances.