It did not occur to her to wonder that no one had thought to send her a jacket. In Snow’s world, very few people thought of her at all.
“Are we going to meet my father?” she asked.
Her question was so beautiful and stupid and useless that Arrin did not know if he wanted to scream or hit something or sit down in the snow and cry.
There were only trees to hit and the snow was cold, and screaming might frighten Snow. He stared fixedly at the mare’s neck, where a lock of her mane insisted on flopping the opposite direction from its fellows. He did not dare look at the girl he had been ordered to kill.
“The queen has told me to kill you and bring her your heart,” he said.
This is not the sort of thing that most of us expect to hear. Snow did not disbelieve it, but she had a hard time understanding it. The words seemed to come from a long way away, in a foreign language that had nothing to do with her.
Still, Arrin had said something, and when someone said something to you, you acknowledged them—
“I see,” said Snow.
Arrin made a barking sound that wavered between a laugh and a sob.
Kill you…kill you…ordered me to kill you…
Snow could not have said when she actually understood the words. A large part of her seemed to be standing around wringing its hands and nothing identifiable as conscious thought was going on. Apparently something in the back of her head had no trouble with the words, however, because Snow turned on her heel, ran three steps to another tree with more conveniently placed branches, and went up the trunk like a squirrel.
It was a harder tree to climb than the tree in the courtyard, but Snow was taller and stronger than when she had first climbed the apple tree. The cold air burned in her lungs, and she expected to hear the crunch of snow under the hunter’s feet, and then a hand would grab her ankle and pull and his knife would come out and that would be the end of her.
She made it a dozen feet up the tree before she realized that Arrin had not moved.
“I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “You don’t need to run.”
“So you say,” said Snow, bracing herself in a V where the main trunk split in half.
He rubbed his hands over his face and looked briefly old, even though he was still a young man. “I didn’t need to tell you at all. If I were really going to kill you, I wouldn’t have said anything.”
There was a certain irrefutable logic to this, but Snow preferred to remain in the tree nonetheless. She did not know any murderers and was not sure how logically they could be expected to behave. Most situations seemed to go better if she was pleasant and biddable, but this was not shaping up to be one of them.
Arrin looked up at her in the tree. He had thought to take her to the crossroad, where he had taken the footman and the kitchen boy, but it was one thing to take a man or an older boy to the crossroads and set them loose, and quite another to dump a girl alone and penniless in the outside world, particularly a girl who happened to be the king’s only daughter.
And there was still the matter of the heart. Where was he going to get a heart?
If I can find a deer…it should be no great task to find a deer…but how much time do I have before the queen begins to wonder? Will she know a deer’s heart from a human one?
“Such a sight this is, Mother!” said a voice behind him—a gurgly, snuffly voice, as if the speaker had something in his throat. “A human man on the ground and a girl in a tree! Never have I seen the like.”
“Perhaps they’re out of squirrels in these parts,” said another voice, as like to the first as two leaves on a tree.
“Perhaps he’s deaf and thought you hunt girls instead of squirrels,” said a third voice.
There was a chorus of groans, quite rightly, and the smack of something hitting flesh.
“Perhaps you should ask them,” said another voice, deeper and wilder and older, but something about it said to Arrin that the speaker was a woman.
He turned.
In a semi-circle around them stood eight wild boars.
Their shoulders were higher than his waist, and the largest of them was longer than his horse. Three sows had the mottled coats of feral hogs, but the others were pure forest boar—or perhaps sow, since the last of the eight were female.
In all that kingdom, the only thing more dangerous than a wild boar was—possibly—the queen. The bears that slept in the winter could be cross in early spring, but they feared humans. A boar knows that humans are small and weak and easily scattered, and holds them in contempt.
All that you need to know about boars can be summed up in the fact that if you wish to hunt them, you must have a specially made boar spear. This spear has a crosspiece on it to prevent the boar from charging the length of the spear, driving it all the way through his own body, to savage the human holding the other end.