Text Leveling System

Princess Academy

RDQ:	2651	Max Word/Sent	47	Total Words	4065		Diff Words	1240
Lex	1000	Ave Word/.Sent	13	Hi Freq occurs	2934	72.2%	Hi freq	522	42.1%
AR	6.1	Long Sentences	28.5	Low Freq occurs	373	9.2%	Low freq	276	22.3%

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
 Miri 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.
Then 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 to trade, that much more to eat during the snow-locked months. Miri longed to help.
Wincing at the rustle of her pea-shuck mattress, Miri stood and stepped carefully over her pa and older sister, Marda, 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?" Marda leaned up on one arm and squinted at the firelight.
"Just for me," said their father.
He looked to where Miri stood, frozen, one foot in a boot, her hands on the laces.
"No," was all he said.
"Pa." Miri stuffed her other foot in its boot and went to him, laces trailing on the dirt floor. She kept her voice casual, as though the idea had 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 bear a work song say winter is long. The sound came closer, and with it an insistence that it was time join in, hurry, hurry, before the workers passed by, before snow encased the mountain inside winter. The sound made Miri's heart feel squeezed between two stones. It was a unifying song and one that she was not invited to join.
Embarrassed to have shown she wanted to go, Miri 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. Marda helped Miri do the inside chores-sweeping the hearth and banking the coals, laying the fresh goat dung out to dry, adding more water to the salt pork soaking for dinner. As Marda sang, Miri 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 Bena's house," said Miri, "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." Marda cringed.
"But Marda, he left it there," said Miri. "This dead fly stuck just under his nose. And when he saw me, he said, 'Good evening, miss,' and the fly. . ." Miri's stomach cramped from trying to keep speaking 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!"
Marda always said she could not resist Miri's low, throaty laugh and defied the mountain itself not to rumble as well. But Miri liked her sister's laugh better than a belly full of soup. At the sound, her 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 a valley. The sky changed from pink to yellow to blue
with the rising sun, but Miri's attention kept shifting to the west and the road from the lowlands.
"I've decided to trade with Enrik again," said Miri, and I'm set on wrestling something extra out of him. Wouldn't that be a feat?"
Marda smiled, humming. Miri 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 or salt fish," said Miri.
"Or honey," said Marda.
"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, Miri 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 than 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 Marda, holding the head of a particularly grumpy goat while Miri did the milking, "after you left, how long did the fly remain?"
At noon, Marda left to help in the quarry. Miri never spoke about this daily moment when Marda
went and Miri stayed behind. She would never tell how small and ugly she felt. Let them all believe I don't care, thought Miri. Because I don't care. I don't.
When Miri 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 had asked her Pa why she could not, he had taken her in his arms, kissed the top of her head, and rocked her with such love, she knew she would leap across the mountaintops if 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. Miri had been tiny from birth and at age fourteen was smaller than 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 Miri 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.
Miri 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 than Miri could dig, and scree littered the slopes that touched the village lanes. It was the cost of living beside a quarry. Miri heard the lowlander traders complain, but she was accustomed to heaps of rock chippings underfoot, fine white dust in the air, and mallets beating out the sound of the mountain's heartbeat.
Linder. It was the mountain's only crop, her village's one means of livelihood. Over centuries, whenever one quarry ran out of tinder, 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 variations on the brilliant white stone. They had mined tinder marbled with pale veins of pink, blue, green, and now silver.
Miri tethered the goats to a twisted tree, sat on the shorn grass, and plucked one of the tiny pink flowers that bloomed out of cracks in the rocks. A miri flower.
The tinder 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 tinder is the most beautiful yet," he had told her mother, "pure white with streaks of silver." But in the story that Miri had pulled out of her pa many times, her mother had refused. "I don't want a daughter named after a stone," she had said, choosing
instead to name her Miri after the flower that conquered rock and climbed to face the sun.
Pa had said that despite pain and weakness after giving birth, her mother would not let go of her tiny baby. A week later, her mother had died. Though Miri had no memory of it save what she 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.
Miri 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 the 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 any 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 free chunks from the mountain, levers to lift them out, and chisels to square them straight. Even from her hilltop, Miri 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 Doter, one of the quarrywomen, came with the faint command Lighten the blow. Quarry-speech. Miri 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 despite 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 Miri 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, Doter must have been telling another quarrier to lighten his strike on a wedge.
How wonderful it would be, Miri thought, to sing in time, to call out in quarry-speech to a friend working on another ledge. To share in the work.
The miri stem 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 hear the linder ripe for the harvest and the power to pull it loose. But wishing for impossible things seemed an insult to the miri 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 shard 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 tawny curls and limbs still brown from the summer sun. Peder. Normally she would shout hello, but over the past year a strange feeling had come inching into Miri, and now she was more likely to hide from him than 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 Miri wonder if he noticed her, too.
She looked from the bald head of the miri flower down to Peder's straw-colored hair and wanted something that she was afraid to speak.
"I wish . . . ," she whispered. Did she dare? "I wish that Peder and I-"
A horn blast echoed so suddenly against the cliffs that Miri dropped the flower stem. The village did not have a horn, so that meant lowlanders. She hated to respond to the lowlanders trumpet like an animal to a whistle, but curiosity overcame her pride. She grabbed the tethers and wrestled the goats down the slope.
"Miri!" Peder jogged up beside her, pulling his goats after him. She hoped her face was not smudged with dirt.
"Hello, Peder. 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 Peder. "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 than the left. Their goats were bleating at one another like little children arguing. "Oh, really, is that so?" Miri asked the lead goat as if she understood their talk.
"What?" said Peder.
"Your nanny there said that stream was so cold it scared her milk right up into her mutton chops." Peder laughed, stirring in her a desire to say something more, something clever and wonderful, but the wanting startled all her thoughts away, so she clamped her mouth shut before she said something stupid. They stopped at Miri's house to tie up the goats. Peder tried to help by taking all the tethers, but the goats started to butt one another, the leads tangled, and suddenly Peder's ankles were bound.
"Wait ... stop," he said, and fell flat to the ground. Miri 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, Miri 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." Miri 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, Peder Doterson, it's making a mess.
"That's what my ma always says, and everyone knows she's never wrong."
Miri realized that the quarry was silent and the only pounding she heard was her own heartbeat in her cars. She hoped Peder 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. Miri had heard of carriages but never seen one before. Someone important must have come with the traders.
"Peder, let's watch from-" Miri started to say, but just then Bena and Liana shouted Peder's name and waved him over. Bena was as tall as Peder, with hair browner than Miri's that hit her waist when loose, and Liana with her large eyes was acknowledged the prettiest girl in the village. They were two years older than Peder, but lately he was the boy they most preferred to smile at.
"Let's watch with them," said Peder, waving, his smile suddenly shy.
Miri shrugged. "Go ahead." She ran the other way,
weaving through the crowd of waiting quarry workers to find Marda, and did not look back.
"Who do you think it could be?" asked Marda, stepping closer to Miri as soon as she approached. Even in a large group, Marda felt anxious standing alone.
"I don't know," said Esa, "but my ma says a surprise from a lowlander is a snake in a box."
Esa was slender, though not as small as Miri, and shared the same tawny hair with her brother, Peder. She was eyeing the wagon, her face scrunched suspiciously. Marda nodded. Doter, Esa and Peder's mother, was known for her wise sayings.
"A surprise," said Frid. 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?" Miri 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?" Frid asked, and both traders snickered. Miri glared at them but did not speak up, afraid of sounding ignorant herself.
Another trumpet blared, and a brightly dressed man stood on the driver's bench and yelled in a high, strained voice, "I call your ears to hearken the chief delegate of Danland."
A delicate man with a short, pointed beard (-merged 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 indicated Mount Eskel."
The chief delegate paused, seemingly waiting for a response, though what kind Miri 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?"
Miri wished that she could shout out just 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, Miri guessed that he had indeed tried to argue with the priests of the creator god and failed.
"As is the tradition, the king commanded an academy be created 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 ministers 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 eye. 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 Miri.
Water in the porridge And more salt in the gruel Doesn't make a belly Full, not a bellyful
Let's do what we came for," shouted a trader.
His voice was an invitation to break the silence. Even such strange news could not delay the most important trading of the year.
"Enrik!" Miri jogged to the trader she had dealt with for the past two years. He was lank and pale, and the way he looked down his thin nose at her reminded Miri of a bird that had gone too long without a grub.
Enrik drove his wagon to the stack of finished stones that represented her family's portion of the past three months' work. Miri pointed out the unusually large size of one block and the quality of the silver grain in others, all the while eyeing the contents of his wagon and calculating how much food her family would need to get through the winter.
"These stones are easily worth your haul," said Miri, trying her best to mimic Doter's warm, solid tone of voice. No one ever argued with Esa and Peder's ma. "But to be nice, I'll trade our stones for everything in your wagon except one barrel of wheat, one bag of lentils, and a crate of salt fish, so long as you include that pot of honey."
Enrik clicked his tongue. "Little Miri, your village is lucky any traders come all this way just for stone. I'll give you half of what you asked."
"Half? You're joking."
"Look around," he said. "Haven't you noticed fewer wagons this year? Other traders hauled supplies to the academy instead of to your village. Besides, your pa won't need so much with you and your sister gone."
Miri folded her arms. "This academy business is just a trick to cheat us, isn't it? I knew it had to be something sneaky because no lowlander is going to make a girl from Mount Eskel into royalty."
"After the news of the academy, no family with eligible girls is going to barter for any better, so you'd best take my offer before I drive away."
Sounds of frustrated conversations blew around the town center. Peder's ma was red-faced and yelling, and Frid's ma looked ready to hit someone.
"But I ... 1 wanted. . ."She had visualized coming

Subjective Criteria

Illustrations: No support

Dialog: Multiple speakers

Dialog: Broken dialogue

Dialog: Unlabeled Speaker

Vocabulary: Many difficult words

Language: Many descriptive words

Sentences: Many Long Complex

Text structure: Story/Poem

Inferences: Several Implications

Complexity: Several unrelated ideas

Concepts: Concrete/Simple Social

Chapters

Author's purpose: Obvious

Sequence of Events: Mostly chronological

Mature Concepts: With some uncommon experiences

Features

Character traits

Integral Setting

Integral Setting - Cultural/Regional

Simple Plot

Topic

Teacher/Teaching

Princes/Princesses

Learning

*Community

Classrooms

Study/Study Skills

*Schools & Education

Relationships

Low Frequency Words

academy	academy's	accustomed	acknowledged	amusement
anticipation	anxious	approached	appropriate	ascend
awakened	barley	barter	bellyful	biscuits
blared	browner	calculating	carriage	carriages
casual	chippings	chisel	chisels	circumstances
concentrated	constant	contents	conversations	council
cringed	curiosity	curls	current	danland
danlander	danlanders	deafening	dealt	debris
deepened	defied	delegate	delicate	despite
determined	dictates	divine	divined	doter
doter's	doterson	echoed	echoes	eligible
embarrassed	embers	encased	esa	eskel
eventually	exposed	eyeing	fanfare	fasting
fetching	fewer	firelight	folk	frantic
frid's	frustrated	future	gawk	glared
gravel	gruel	harbored	harvest	hearken
heartbeat	hearth	honeyed	horizon	house's
hovering	ignorant	imagination	imagined	impulse
inching	indicated	insistence	insult	intended
invitation	jangle	jogged	kingdom	laced
ladies	lank	ledge	leggings	lentils
lever	liana	lighten	lighter	likely
linder	littered	livelihood	lodged	longed
loosened	lords	lowlander	lowlander's	lowlanders
lowlands	majesty	mallet	mallets	marbled
marda	mattress	mentioning	messenger	midst
milked	milking	mimic	mined	ministers
miri	miri's	morrow	mount	mountaintops
mutton	mysterious	nannies	neighbors	noble
notion	occurred	omens	onion	overcame
overlapping	pallets	particularly	patches	patronizing
paused	peder	peder's	perform	performed
performing	perplexed	plucked	portion	potential
precious	preferred	prettiest	priests	private
pronouncement	pure	purpose	pursued	quarrier
quarries	quarry	quarrywomen	recognized	rectangular
reflected	refusal	refused	represented	request
resist	respond	response	rhythm	rhythms
rite	roused	royal	royalty	rustle
sayings	scree	scrunched	season	seemingly
select	servants	shard	shared	shorn
shouldered	shown	shrugged	shuck	shucks
skinnier	slender	smudged	snatched	snickered
sounding	speech	sprawled	squashed	squint
squinted	startled	stingy	stirred	stirring
strewn	stubble	stung	supplication	supplies
suspiciously	tangled	tawny	territory	tethered
tethers	throaty	thrust	tightness	tinder
tingle	trader	traders	tradition	trumpeted
trumpeting	uncovered	underfoot	undertaking	unfolded
unifying	updraft	upright	urge	urgency
variations	veins	vibrations	village's	villagers
visualize	wafted	watered	weakness	weaving
wedge	wincing	wisdom	wobbled	wonderment
worth	wrestled	wrestling	yawn	younger