Toad Words(26)

“Ride with me,” he said. “The queen commands it.”

Snow looked up at him blankly. The words made no sense. She had almost succeeded in putting the encounter with the queen in the herbary out of her mind. She had to think about each word separately and the word queen made a strange little space around itself in her head and did not seem to attach to the other words around it.

Behind his eyes, Arrin was panicking. The queen might be watching them. She could not read minds—probably—or the steward would be dead and the cook hung for treason long ago, but everyone knew that she talked to the mirror and it talked back and sometimes it told her things. Even if the mirror was not involved, she need only go to her bower window and looked down to see what was happening in the courtyard.

They had to go now. At once.

He reached down and grabbed Snow’s arms and hauled her up onto his tall mare. The horse did not much care for this, but Snow was obedient, as always, and if Arrin wanted her to ride his horse, apparently that was how it was to be. She got a leg braced in the stirrups on top of Arrin’s foot and managed to get herself adjusted over the mare’s withers. The mare snorted and stomped one foot. She was a good hunter and used to carrying heavy objects slung across the saddle, but there were limits.

Arrin tugged the reins and turned the mare toward the forest and cantered away from the castle.





It was a long ride. There was snow on the ground under the black trees. Snow grew cold very rapidly, for she was not dressed for a long ride in winter, but the horse was hot, and she wrapped her fingers in the mare’s mane to warm them.

Arrin waited for her to ask him where or why or for what reason. Something. When she did not, guilt and dread and terror mixed itself up in his stomach until he thought he might be violently ill. (He wasn’t, but mostly because he couldn’t see how it would help.)

Nearly an hour passed, and then Snow stirred and said, “Will it be much farther now?”

“I don’t know,” said Arrin.

Snow nodded, and looked back down at her hands.

He couldn’t kill her. He couldn’t. He killed deer and pheasants and boars, and once a bear that had woken too early from its winter sleep. He did not kill girls.

He wanted her to ask so that he could tell her he didn’t kill girls, because then it would be true. The fact that she did not ask and he could not say it out loud made him question it, because if he did not kill her, he would have to come back to the queen without a heart, and the queen would kill him.

If he did not come back, however, the queen might punish his aunt. She was entirely capable of doing so. If he had choose between Snow or his aunt…Oh, gods and saints, he could not do this.

Snow did not ask questions. She had been pleasant and biddable her entire life and it had served her well enough. And Arrin had invoked the name of the queen, and the queen’s word was law. If it was the queen’s will that she ride out into the winter woods, then she would ride.

She wondered where they were going.

Perhaps she was being sent to her father? He had ridden away some years ago, on crusade or some other errand. Snow would not be much use on crusade, but perhaps he had found a need for a daughter. She sat up a little straighter. She would have preferred to bring her cloak and her comb with her, if she were riding to stay with the king, but no one would expect the queen to concern herself with such things.

I cannot kill her, thought Arrin, keeping his arms well away from her body, as if she burned, I cannot kill her, but a heart, I must have a heart, oh gods and saints, where will I find a heart to bring the queen…?





If it had been left to Arrin and Snow, they would have ridden until both of them dropped, for Arrin could hardly think and Snow would not complain. But there was a third creature involved, and the horse tired of carrying double and stopped and set her feet and blew through her nostrils in complaint. At last, Arrin’s head cleared and he drew up the reins.

“Get off,” he said, more harshly than he intended. “She needs rest.”

Snow slid down the horse’s shoulder and felt her knees almost buckle, which was interesting. She wasn’t used to that. The ground was bracken, covered with a crust of snow cut by ferns. She floundered five steps and leaned against the trunk of a tree.

Arrin dismounted as well, rubbing his horse’s neck and looping the reins up on the saddle. The mare lipped at his sleeve to show him that she forgave him for the treatment.

Snow was very cold. Riding a horse in winter is no treat, and now even the warmth of the mare’s body was gone. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.

Arrin pulled his jacket off and tossed it to her. Snow caught it, surprised, but pulled it on over her shoulders. It smelled like him, and also of horse.