Toad Words

by T. Kingfisher

  “Do you—do you not want to stay here?” asked Snow. “To be with her, when—”

  The boar shook his head. “In the end,” he said, “we all die alone.”

  Snow felt ashamed without knowing why.

  She clambered onto the boar’s back, using the great bone ridge at the top of his skull for a hand-hold. He was bristly and prickly and gave off heat like a furnace.

  “Don’t pull my ears,” he said. “Hold onto my fur.” He set out at a trot.

  It was not a comfortable ride—despite all the flesh on a boar, their backs are bony—but Snow held on.

  One by one, the wild pigs left the clearing with the trampled-down snow.

  As they left, Snow heard the old sow say “Now, hunter-man, let me see the sharpness of your knife…”

  She stared fixedly between the boar’s ears. The snow was beginning again.

  A little time later, when the snow was falling thickly and the trees were black scrawls against the whiteness, they heard a distant squealing scream.

  The boars stopped. One or two snuffed at the snow, and the feral sow who had spoken up leaned against one of the boars and rubbed her cheek against his.

  Snow’s own boar sighed, and they began walking again through the snow.

  The boars’ den was a low, dark hole in the ground, but once you were inside, it was surprisingly pleasant. There was an enormous fireplace, of stones set in clay, and if the workmanship was crude, it was still very solid. There were rushes strewn about the floor, a slab of wood that resembled a table, and several enormous frying pans hung on the walls.

  “Do you cook with those?” asked Snow timidly.

  “Well, if you call it cooking,” said one of the boars, and there were a few subdued snorts of laughter.

  There was no cooking that night. They shook their bristles and settled down in heaps on the rushes before the fire. One grabbed a few logs of firewood in his teeth and tossed them onto the blaze.

  The feral sow—the large spotted one who had spoken to Arrin—nodded to Snow. “There are apples in the bin,” she said, jerking her head to the back of the den. “Tomorrow, we’ll make a proper meal, but tonight we are tired and our bones are sad.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Snow.

  She made her way to the back of the den. It was raised slightly, almost in a walkway around the sleeping area, and there were bins there. Like the fireplace, they were crude, massive structures of clay and stone.

  The sort of thing an intelligent boar might build without having the use of hands, thought Snow.

  One was full of potatoes, in actual bags. Another, narrower bin was full of oddly shaped lumps with a rich, earthy smell.

  The final bin was full of apples. Snow picked one up and bit into it. It was crisp and sweet, not tart like her apple tree back home.

  (Home, home, home… echoed in her head, half-mockingly.)

  Did it still count as a home, when you had been banished from it? Was it a home, when someone there wanted you dead?

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  “You may sleep beside me, if you wish,” said the spotted sow. Her face was unreadable, but her voice was kind. “Or beside the fire, there, where it is warm.”

  “Thank you,” whispered Snow.

  Snow had not slept beside another living creature since the wet nurse had handed her over to the midwife. It was too strange a concept in a day of strangeness. She crept beside the fireplace, where there was a little nook in the wall, and pulled Arrin’s jacket tight around her. She turned to put the stones against her back.

  The seven wild boars settled themselves about the room. They made the place seem small. A few took apples from the bin themselves and crunched them down, cores and all, before settling.

  There were grumbles and grunts and low conversations, and then, one by one, they fell silent, and there was only the sound of their breathing. The fire painted orange light on their great black bodies.

  A long time later, when she was sure that they were asleep, Snow caught the hem of the jacket in her teeth and began, soundlessly, to cry.

  The feral sow, whose name was Greatspot, heard it, and her ears flicked in that direction in the dark. Pigs are social creatures, but they are also intensely private, and they find humans fragile and baffling, so though her instinct was to comfort, she held her peace.

  The queen sat in her bower, with the pig heart in a jewelry box beside her.

  She had dumped her jewels out on the vanity, careless of them, and held the box out to Arrin.

  “My queen,” he whispered, placing the bloody heart within, and left nearly at a run.

  She barely noticed.

  The old sow’s heart was larger than Snow’s would have been, but the queen was not a woman given to overseeing the kitchens and had never seen a pig’s organs taken out and washed and ground into sausage. And human hearts are usually smaller than you think they should be (which explains a great deal), so the queen found nothing unusual in the old sow’s heart.

  She laid her hand across the lid, and felt magic tingle underneath it.

  “The witchblood in that one was stronger than I thought,” she said to the mirror. “It is as well I did this now, before she had time to grow into her strength.”

  The mirror said nothing. It was not in the habit of volunteering information.

  “Now,” she said, sitting up straighter. “Now tell me! Who?”

  The mirror licked its lips, and cast its vision out, out, out…

  Snow curled in her nook in the fireplace. Her hair stuck to her forehead in strings. Her white skin had turned red and her nose was shiny and there was snot on her upper lip. Her mouth was open in a silent scream of grief.

  And the mirror saw her, her face screwed up and hideous with grief…and passed on.

  “You are the fairest,” said the demon in the mirror, and the queen stroked the box with the old sow’s heart and smiled.

  Snow woke slowly. It was not a terribly comfortable bed she had made for herself, huddled against the stones of the wall, but you cannot cry so hard and heavily and not exhaust yourself. She thought that she could have slept another hour at least, but the other residents of the den were up and moving.

  The pigs were bustling about, preparing food. The only sign that they had lost a loved one the night before came when three boars and one of the feral sows stood before the coals of the fire.

  Snow could not read their faces, but she thought that looks passed between them.

  “Well,” said one of the boars. “Well.”

  “Someone must,” said another boar.

  Two more gathered, and they looked to the feral sow called Greatspot.

  “Very well,” she said. “If you are sure.” She looked over their heads to her sisters.

  The saddle-marked one said, “Yes.” The other feral sow, the smallest of the seven, nodded.

  Greatspot caught a poker up in her teeth and knelt before the fire. She jabbed it once, twice in the fire, and the sparks blazed up. A boar beside her—Snow thought the others had called him Stomper—was ready with a log clasped in his teeth, and threw it into the fire.

  It caught quickly. Greatspot turned away from it, and that was that.

  Snow stood up. The saddle-marked sow (her name, Snow learned, was Juniper) stood on her hind legs and pulled one of the great frying pans down from the wall.

  They were odd pans. A boar’s trotters are not well suited to grasping, so they held the handles in their mouths. Each handle had a crosspiece made of oak, scarred and dented with the imprints of their teeth.

  It turned out that Snow was not required to cook with the frying pans right away (which was just as well, because she could barely lift them.) Where the boars ran into trouble was in preparing the food. They were very fond of omelets, but cracking an egg without getting shell everywhere is a difficult knack, even for human hands. They could hack potatoes apart (the boars were also very fond of potatoes) and use a few herbs, but there their ski
lls deserted them. Without fingers, they could only do so much.

  So Snow, who was feeling very lost and very alone, went to the wooden table and rolled up her sleeves and began chopping up potatoes, because this was a skill that she understood very well.

  She had never particularly liked chopping potatoes, but she didn’t mind now. When you are in a room full of people who all know where they fit in and what to do next, there is nothing so cheering as a task that you can do and do well.

  She thought she had gone through most of a bushel before Juniper laughed a throaty hog-laugh and said, “Enough! Can you do onions as well?”

  She could and did. Juniper seemed so pleased with the results that the tears in Snow’s eyes were not all from onions.

  Breakfast was potatoes and onions fried on the fire, with rough salt tossed over it. (Juniper dug the salt out of a bag as big as Snow’s torso, using a rough wooden scoop held in her teeth, and flung it over the pan with a jerk of her head.)

  By the castle cook’s standards, the meal was rough and awkwardly seasoned. By Snow’s standards, it was the greatest thing she had ever eaten. She had only had a single apple since leaving the castle the day before.

  The pigs ate astonishingly neatly. They did not use silverware, but they each had a deep bowl. They grunted and snuffled, true, each to their own, but did not slop them around, and when they had seconds and thirds, they did not squabble over who got which share.

  In fact, it was a great deal more civilized than watching the guardsmen eat in the guardhouse.

  There were seven. The boars were named Stomper and Hoofblack, Puffball, and Truffleshadow. (Stomper was the one that Snow had ridden the night before.) The sows were Greatspot and Juniper, and the littlest one, who rarely spoke, was named Ashes.

  The boars were brothers, the sons of the old sow. Greatspot, Juniper, and Ashes had come from somewhere else, and speech had been given to them in some fashion that Snow did not quite understand.

  “A gift,” said Greatspot. “Not an easy gift, but a great one.”

  Ashes nodded.

  After breakfast, the pigs went outside. Snow trailed after them, gasping in the cold bright air.

  For the most part, the pigs seemed to be occupied in snuffling about for acorns, but Juniper and Puffball were doing something else, putting some kind of contraption on Puffball’s back.

  “Here,” said Juniper. “Can you help? This bit’s…stuck under…”

  Snow jumped to help.

  The contraption was a pair of baskets, like panniers, that went over the boar’s back. These had clearly been made by human hands, the workmanship neat, if worn. A strap had gotten twisted, which was easy enough for Snow to correct. She settled the baskets more evenly on Puffball’s back.

  “There we are,” said Juniper, pleased. “Now we’re going to gather firewood. Would you like to help?”

  “Yes,” said Snow, grateful for the task, “I’d like that.”

  That night, when Snow settled into the nook beside the fire, Ashes appeared with a mouthful of rushes. She dropped them at Snow’s feet, then returned a moment later with more.

  “Thank you,” said Snow, when the rushes were ankle deep, and she thought that she might sleep far more comfortably tonight. “You’re very kind.”

  Ashes said nothing, but she met Snow’s eyes for a moment before she fled.

  The days passed and piled up into weeks. The apple bin emptied. There were still plenty of potatoes, and the boars filled up on acorns in the wood. Snow roasted potatoes on the great iron pans and learned to lift them, although it took both arms and she had to lean far back to brace them.

  She also learned what the great lumpy things in the bin were—truffles.

  When she realized that the entire bin was full of them, Snow’s jaw dropped. Every now and again someone would bring Cook one. “Rarer than gold,” Cook had said. She would shave them as fine as sawdust over dishes and they went to no one but the king and queen. Sometimes she would soak a slice of truffle in oil and use the oil to flavor dishes for months to come.

  But even the largest truffle Cook had ever gotten was the size of Snow’s fist, and here were truffles as large as her head, dozens of them, piled up so that the bin was overflowing. It was a treasure beyond imagining.

  “We trade them,” Juniper explained. “There’s a peddler. He brings us potatoes and we give him truffles.” She sighed. “There was a tinker, years ago, who made our frying pans and baskets, and took truffles in trade as well. He stopped coming. We think he died. We miss him.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Snow.

  The sow tilted her snout upwards, and Snow, who was learning to read their expressions, smiled back. “We were hoping that perhaps, in spring, you could talk to the peddler for us. Humans are better at talking to humans.”

  The thought of talking to another human filled Snow with excitement and dread. She had fallen in love with the boars quite easily. They were easy creatures to love. They were cheerful, exuberant beasts, and they had wicked senses of humor. They had taken her in, and she was very glad to find that she was useful to them. They never failed to thank her for the little services that she could provide with her more nimble fingers, and she suspected that they had stopped eating the apples so that there were more for her. Even Ashes, who would go a full season without speaking a sentence, had stopped flinching when Snow made sudden movements.

  And yet they were not human.

  Long before the peddler came, however, Snow saw another human face again.

  “I’ve looked all over for you,” said Arrin, swinging down from his mare. “I’ve been over this patch of ground a dozen times, and you’d never know there were a half-dozen boars living here.”

  Snow shrank back a little. Part of her responded to Arrin with wild enthusiasm—One of my people! Someone from home!—and another part said, He was told to kill you! What if he’s come to finish the job?

  One does not become a hunter without learning the ways of shy creatures. Arrin saw Snow step back, and saw one of the boars moving purposefully in their direction. He very wisely stopped in his tracks.

  Arrin held up both hands, empty. “I don’t mean any harm.” His eyes moved from Snow’s white face to the boar’s black bristly one. “If I did, I expect I’d be out of luck.”

  The boar was Puffball, who had an enormous sense of humor even for a pig. Puffball grinned, and said, “Ah, but you might taste good with potatoes, hunter-man. We could find out.”

  “I’d rather not,” said Arrin. He could see the other boars drifting closer through the trees. “I haven’t come to take her back.”

  Snow let her breath out in a long sigh. She had hoped. She knew that the queen would never let her back, that the queen, if she was very lucky, would never even know that she was still alive—and yet she was human, and had hoped.

  “The queen believes you are dead. The heart satisfied her.” Arrin sketched a little bow in Puffball’s direction and the boar grinned.

  “My father hasn’t sent word,” said Snow. It was not—quite—a question.

  Arrin shook his head.

  She took a deep breath, feeling the cold air go all the way to the bottom of her lungs. It hurt a little. Maybe it was supposed to. “Then I’ll stay here.”

  The huntsman took a step closer. “Are you sure? Snow—my lady—”

  “Snow,” said Snow firmly. “Just Snow.”

  “Snow, then. I could take you away. To the crossroads, where I took the kitchen boy and the underfootman and the others. There’s a town not far. I have a little money saved, and the midwife gave me a little more. You could get quite far from here—”

  Snow was already shaking her head.

  “They need me,” she said. “There is a peddler—they dig up truffles to trade, you see, enormous truffles, like you’ve never seen—and trade them for potatoes, and he can’t be paying them enough. They’d be eating off gold-plated dishes if he paid them enough. And they aren’t good at chopping potato
es. And—” she could see him shaking his head, “and I have to stay close by, for when my father comes back. He’ll want to see me, you know.”

  (He has never wanted to see you, whispered the traitorous little voice.)

  Perhaps Arrin heard the voice as well, because his face was sad. “How long will you wait?” he asked. “He might have settled elsewhere, or died on Crusade. The queen might live forever. Witches do, sometimes. How long will you stay in the woods?”

  “At least until I talk to the peddler,” said Snow firmly.

  She did not send him away empty-handed. She made him a list of things she needed, and the boars gave her the smallest truffle—not much larger than a walnut—to pay for it.

  “A rope,” she said. “A blanket. A ball of twine. Needle and thread. My clothes, if you can get them without any questions.” She smiled, a little sadly. “And any apples that Cook can spare.”

  “I will do my best,” said Arrin. He reached out and touched her arm, and it had been so long since a human had touched her that Snow felt her breath catch.

  She watched him ride away on his tall brown mare, and when she turned away she shook herself, as if something deep inside had shivered.

  It was a hard time at the castle. The midwife spoke to no one. She would have thrown herself on the queen and throttled her with her bare hands, but she knew that her gardener might suffer for it, killed as a co-conspirator perhaps, so she grew quieter and quieter until she did not speak at all, and the gardener had to beg her to eat.

  The steward met Arrin’s eyes and knew that Snow was not dead, but Arrin dared not speak and the steward dared not speak, and everyone knew that the huntsman had brought the queen a heart.

  The queen’s chambers stank of rotting meat. The maids put sweet rushes on the floor and burned candles and hung bundles of dried herbs over the doors, but the sow’s heart was rotting in its box. They took to wearing cloths dipped in rose oil over their faces, and the first flies of spring scrabbled at the panes.