Toad Words (15 page)

He did not think that they would follow too closely or try too hard to find him, but it was not only his own life at stake.

He spent three days this way. Twice he heard the distant belling of hounds, but far off. On the third day he heard nothing, and made his way at last to Snow and the boars.

He saw Hoofblack first, rooting in the leaves for mushrooms. The boar snorted a greeting and trotted along beside the mare. Arrin looked down and remembered Snow saying “I couldn’t invent a chimney.”
 

This is an architect in the body of a boar
.
 

The thought was so strange that he had to set it aside for a moment.
 

“Come to see Snow, hunter-man?” said Hoofblack. “She’ll be glad of it. So will we.”
 

“You will?” asked Arrin.

“Sure. Humans need humans. Pigs need pigs.” Hoofblack lifted his snout. “We go a bit mad ourselves if we don’t see anyone. Happened to Ashes before she could talk, and now she’s made of squeal and bones, poor soul.”
 

“I’d hate for Snow to be reduced to squeal and bones,” said Arrin dryly.

Hoofblack gave a wheezing laugh. “Wouldn’t take long. She’s half bones already, no matter how many potatoes Juniper fries up. We worry a strong breeze’ll come along and she’ll blow away, away, away like a leaf in autumn.”
 

He cast a critical eye up at Arrin. “You could use a few more potatoes yourself. You should stay for dinner.”

“Thank you,” said Arrin. “I may have to, at that.”

He told them the whole story over dinner. The heart in the box, the madness of the queen. The pursuit. “She must have found out,” he said. “I don’t know how. I can’t get word back—they don’t dare get word out to me—”

He dropped his eyes and stared at his hands where they lay over his knees. They were long, lean hands with scarred fingers. He clenched them and watched his knuckles go white.

Greatspot, always maternal, laid her broad bristly cheek against Snow’s. “Careful, child. You smell like the bad end of winter. You must know we won’t let her get to you.”

“She’s got magic,” said Snow, almost inaudibly. “The mirror—I don’t know how much more. Everyone says.”

Grunting laughter filled the den. “Magic is as magic does,” said Truffleshadow. “She tries to magic us and she’ll soon learn her mistake.”
 

“It’s Snow I’m worried about,” said Arrin. “I don’t think the queen much cares about the rest of us.”

“Mmm.”
 

“Hrrff.”

“Huh.”

Snow scrubbed at her face with the back of her hand. “I’ll be fine. She won’t come out all this way. She never went looking for me when I was a girl, why should she do it now?”

“She ordered me to cut out your heart and kept it in a
box,”
said Arrin. “I think her feelings have changed.”
 

Stomper laughed at that. Juniper nipped him. Arrin regretted himself immediately and put a hand on Snow’s shoulder.
 

“Snow—I’m sorry—”

Amazingly, she laughed again. “Thank you. I forget sometimes—oh, it’s all absurd! She wants to cut my heart out and put it in a box! How is this happening?”

Not so absurd,
Arrin thought, remembering what she had wanted to do to the kitchen boy.

Snow got up again and pulled an enormous iron frying pan out of the fire. Arrin eyed it with alarm. It was hard to believe that Snow could even lift it, but a winter of cooking for the boars had left wiry bands of muscle across her arms.
 

“Let me get that—”

“Oh, don’t,” said Snow. “I can do so little. It took me months before I could carry one of these, and there are so few things I’m proud of.” She swung the pan to a scarred oak tabletop. Juniper put her hooves up on the table and scraped the potatoes into the deep bowls the boars used.
 

Arrin sat back down.
You can do so little,
he thought,
and I can do even less, because you will not let me take you away from here. And perhaps I should not even try, because what can I do to keep you safe that your four-footed friends cannot?

The pigs grunted into their potatoes, and Arrin and Snow sat in silence in front of the fire.
 

 
“Where is the huntsman?”
 

The mirror yawned, showing a ribbed pink gullet like a cat. “In the woods.”

“Where
in the woods?”

“Among trees.”

The queen ground her teeth. Thin muscles along her jaw pulsed. “Do not toy with me, mirror.”

The mirror’s surface shimmered. “There are many trees, O queen. Do not blame me if I cannot tell them all apart.”
 

“Is he ten miles away? Twenty? A hundred?”

“He is in the woods, O queen.”

The queen’s nails gouged into the edge of the dressing table. The tips of her fingers were bloody and marked with scabs. “What of Snow? Where is Snow?”

“Snow is in the woods.”

“They are together, then,” said the queen.

The mirror considered what answer would be the most infuriating to the queen, and said, “Yes.”
 

She stood up. Three steps one way, three steps back, clasping her bloody fingertips to her breast. “Together. Well. If he puts a brat in her belly, that will be the end of her use as an heir. The king would cast her off before he’d turn the kingdom over to a huntsman’s son.”
 

“And you’d be a grandmother,” said the mirror sweetly. “How delightful for you—”

The queen’s fist struck the mirror, hard enough to split her knuckles. The mirror laughed uproariously.
 

“Temper, O queen…” It grinned. “The king won’t like it.”

“The king! Where is he?”

“The king is in the woods.”

“
These
woods? Here?”

“The king is in the woods.”

“Mirror!” cried the queen, half an order, half a child’s wail. “Mirror, damn you, answer me! Where is the king? Is he coming here? Who is with him?”

The mirror rippled. “He comes with the remains of his men. He comes with a new bride beside him. He comes thinking how he will rid himself of you.”
 

The queen stood very still.
 

The king would come, and Snow would be gone. The servants would tell him what had happened.
 

She had always known that this day would come, but she had believed in herself, in her own witchblood’s power. She had believed that she would be prepared.
 

“Too soon,” she whispered. “It was too soon! It has not been so long.”

“It has been many years,” said the mirror, and showed the queen her own face, with the lines etched cruelly on it.
 

“I must find them,” said the queen, tearing at her hair. “I must find her! Who, mirror?
Who?”
 

“Look at yourself,” said the demon, almost gently. “Look at your hair in clumps and your hands in ruins. Look at you in your bower that stinks of rotten meat. Not you, O queen. You are very far from fair.”
 

The words seemed to steady the queen somehow. She nodded once, sharply. “No. I am not. Very well. I will be less fair still, if that it what it takes.”

She rapped the mirror with her hand and it turned obligingly into a true mirror, with a face that did not move of its own accord.
 

“I have been young,” she said. “Now I must be old.”
 

In her veins, the witchblood coiled and stirred.
 

Her face in the mirror sagged. The lines drawn hard around her mouth grew soft and sagged. Her eyelids became crumpled rice paper. The veins in the back of her hands stood up in ropes and hoarfrost crept through her hair.

The mirror reflected it back, pitiless and pure.
 

Even a heart as black as the queen’s could ache a little for how easy it was to become old.
 

“Now,” said the queen—and even her voice was old, as thin and bony as her hands. “
Now.”

“My queen,” said the mirror—or perhaps it was only in her head. “O queen, what have you become?”

The queen laughed. The sound hurt her, high and crazy, but she kept laughing, like scratching tender skin until it bleeds. “How do I kill her?” she asked. “The last question for you, mirror. How do I kill Snow?”

The mirror, who saw everything that happened in the castle, remembered a white face in a gnarled tree. “Give her an apple,” it said.
 

“Poison,” said the queen. “Yessssss. That is well.”
 

She fitted her gnarled fingers into the half-moon shapes on the table’s edge, where the splinters were still sharp. She bore down.

Witchblood oozed beneath her fingers. She lifted her hand and gazed at her fingertips.
 

“Blood of my blood.
Find Snow.”
 

She had done no real magic in almost a decade, beyond speaking to the mirror. Her blood had slept.

It was not sleeping now.
 

A great hollow beast roared in her veins. The mirror jerked when she brushed against it. The demon made a sound that was almost pain.

There.
 

She could feel it in her throat and in her belly. Snow was
there.
 

The queen strode out of the bower—or tried. Her hips throbbed and one knee tried to buckle under her. She caught at the back of a chair for support and learned what it was to be old.
 

“Very well,” she said. “Very well! So be it.”
 

It came to her that Snow’s blood was young and hot and a draught of it might go down kindly. Her own blood roared approval.
 

She fed the pain to the witchblood, and hobbled out of the bower for the last time.
 

“She wasn’t very interesting anyway,” said the mirror-demon, and closed its eyes and went to sleep.
 

“No,” said Snow. “You are not going with me. I’m going with the pigs.” She tightened one of Greatspot’s cinches.
 

“My horse can carry two,” said Arrin. “We can go much faster.”

“I very much doubt
that
,” said Puffball. He eyed Arrin’s mare and snapped his teeth.
 

The mare, no fool, sidled to the end of her rein and tugged. Puffball snickered.

“It’s not about speed,” said Snow. “I want to go to the convent.”

“Convent,” said Arrin blankly.
 

“There’s a convent a few hours from the village—”

“Yes, I know. Sisterhood of Saint Mirriam, I think.”

Snow threw her hands in the air. “You knew there was a convent there and you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t realize that you were so interested in convents! It’s never come up!”

Snow sighed and dropped her forehead onto Puffball’s back.

“What’s a convent?” asked the boar.
 

“A place where human women live together. No men.”

“Seems a bit dull to me.”
 

“I can see the appeal sometimes…” muttered Greatspot.
 

“Sorry,” said Arrin.

“No, it’s all right,” said Snow, blowing a puff of air through her pale bangs. “It’s not as if we’ve talked about much of anything, other than how people are trying to kill me.”
 

Arrin winced.
 

“But yes. I am going to the convent. I was hoping there might be someone who would be willing to talk to—um—my friends here. In case something happens to me. You know.”

“Something might happen to you if you go alone.”

“She’s hardly alone,” said Greatspot mildly. “Would you like to fight two of us, hunter-man?”

“This is a stupid argument,” said Snow. “Let’s go.”

“But—”

Puffball and Greatspot strode out on either side of her. Arrin was left holding his mare in the middle of the clearing and feeling foolish.

Stomper, the largest of the boars, gave him an amused look. “You want some advice, hunter-man?”

Arrin ran a hand over the tight cap of his hair. “Not really.”

“No one ever does,” said the boar cheerfully, and walked away.
 

His mare yanked at the reins again.
 

Eventually, for lack of anything better to do, Arrin got on his horse and rode after Snow.

“You’re not allowed to come with me,” said Snow, not turning her head. “If you want to come, you have to wait in the woods. I don’t want anyone to know we’re together.”

“Ashamed of me?” asked Arrin.
 

She twisted her neck to look at him. “I will be if you don’t stop being dense. We’re both fugitives from the Queen. If they recognize either one of us, fine, but if
both
of us get caught, then who’s going to keep Puffball and Greatspot here from getting cheated?”

Puffball bumped her with his shoulder. “You know, we’d be a bit upset if anything happened to you. There are more important things in life than potatoes.”

“Not that many things,” said Snow, who had been living on potatoes for so long that she could hardly imagine a meal that didn’t include them. She sighed.
 

She dug her fingers into the ropes around Greatspot’s back. The sow flicked an ear at her.
 

Can I really just walk in to a convent and say “Hi, I have these seven magic pigs that I live with and I need you to take over agenting for them because humans are awful and will try to cheat them?”

Probably not. I’ll talk to them. If they aren’t the right sort of people, I don’t lose anything, and maybe we can sell some truffles. Nuns wouldn’t cheat someone. Although they might think the pigs are demons…oh, blast! I hope not. People are so stupid some times…

 
“It’s not fair,” she said aloud.
 

“Nothing’s fair,” said Arrin. He slipped off his horse and walked beside them. “That you should be a fugitive least of all.”

“Oh,” said Snow. “No, not
that.
I mean, no, I shouldn’t, obviously—the queen shouldn’t be trying to kill me. Or anyone, I guess, unless they really deserved it and I don’t think I do. But that’s not what I was thinking about.”