Toad Words(23)

So they banded together as best they could to temper some of the worst of her excesses.

The first time she ordered an execution, the master-at-arms and the steward and the chief huntsman stared at each other across the great table in the kitchen, while the cook prowled behind them. It was the master-at-arms who said, “We cannot do it.”

“The lad wasn’t trying to murder her,” said the cook, holding a meat cleaver in her thick fingers. “It was a chicken bone, for god’s sake. A chicken bone!”

“She choked on it,” said the steward.

“Would that it had killed her!” hissed the cook, which was treason, and treason tripled when the three men nodded.

They did not speak for a little time, while the cook prowled with her knife.

“I cannot order my men to kill a kitchen boy,” said the master-at-arms at last.

“Perhaps there is another way,” said the huntsman. He was younger than either of the others and had less contact with the queen.

So the kitchen boy was smuggled out in a hay-wagon, and a false grave dug by the huntsman and the master-at-arms. The tall, stoop-shouldered steward told no one how badly his gut had churned when he approached the queen in her bower and said, “It is done, my lady.”

“Good,” said the queen, staring into the mirror. “Good.”

She did not stop brushing her hair when she spoke.

The steward would speak those words several more times over the next few years, and would thank all the saints and the little household gods that the queen did not wish to watch the executions herself.

Once, when she ordered a clumsy footman to have his hand chopped off, she asked to see the hand. The steward said, in his patient, colorless voice, “Forgive me, my lady. I did not think to preserve it for you. It has been burned.”

“A pity,” said the queen, turning back to her mirror.

The steward informed her two days later than the footman had died of infection from the stump. The huntsman had, in fact, ridden out with him a day earlier and left him—hands very much intact—at the crossroads leading away from the kingdom.

“A pity,” said the queen again, and continued to brush her hair.

Another way that the servants defied the queen was in the matter of Snow.

Snow was largely kept from the queen’s sight, because it was easier for everyone. The midwife lived in a little detached cottage—one of a number of small buildings that straggled about the castle like lost goslings. The cottage fronted onto the herb garden, because in addition to delivering babies, the midwife brewed a great many potions and possets for the people of the kingdom. The head gardener had been trying for years to get her to marry him and move into the bigger house on the other side of the garden, which had stone floors and real glass in the windows. But the midwife preferred to stay in her own cottage and tend the herb garden, although she was not above spending the night at the gardener’s house once or twice a week.

Snow grew up in the little cottage. The steward carefully set aside a room in the castle for her, as far from the queen’s bower as possible, and suggested that Snow consider moving into it, for appearance’s sake. Snow smiled and thanked him, and continued to live in the little cottage by the herb garden.

What she did not say was that she could not sleep in the castle, that laying in the large, richly appointed room made her skin itch crazily over her muscles and her mind run in ragged little circles all night long. There was no rest for her in the castle. Her mother was mad—the servants all said so—and her father was gone and had not noticed her even when he was present.

So the maids changed the linens weekly and straightened nonexistent clutter, and Snow learned to weed an herb garden, and the queen gazed into the mirror and ordered her servants killed.





Snow was seventeen when things changed.

She had lately outgrown her clothes. Her skirts came up so high that she could have waded a stream bone-dry, and her shirts did not want to close on top without extra lacing. Winter was beginning in earnest, and there was not a single jacket that could fit her across the shoulders. The midwife went to the steward and informed him of this, and the steward went to the seamstress and ordered new clothing made.

Most of it was good solid peasant stuff, as the midwife had demanded, but the steward had not forgotten that Snow was a princess, and he knew that the day might come when she was required to look like one. So among the skirts and kirtles and underclothes, there was a gown with a blue bodice and puffed sleeves. (The seamstress had always had a great desire to sew something with puffed sleeves, and the fact that Snow stared at them with great astonishment and mild indignation did nothing to diminish her moment of glory.)