Arrin knew that he was dead. If the boars wanted to kill him, he was dead. His horse might out-distance them, if she got a good run at it, but he could never get on her back before they reached him.
Snow, up her tree, might be safe until they grew bored and wandered away.
“Well?” asked the first voice. “Have you an answer, hunter-man?”
He saw the boar’s mouth move. He saw the red tongue and the lips sliding along the great yellow tusks.
The boar was talking.
I’ve gone mad, thought Arrin, suddenly greatly relieved. If he was hearing boars talk, then he was mad. If he was mad, perhaps he had hallucinated the whole thing. Perhaps the queen had given him no orders. Perhaps he was having a nightmare. Anything was possible, if the boar was talking.
“Perhaps he’s mute,” said another of the boars.
“Usually they never shut up,” said one of the ferals, a huge sow with a black saddle marking across her back.
“How can you talk?” asked Snow, from up in the tree.
“Ah,” said the first boar. He pawed at the ground with one hoof. “Mother?”
The female next to him laughed softly, and Arrin realized that it was the owner of the deep female voice he had heard. She was not as large as some of the others, and the bones of her face stood out in sharp relief. Her bristles were frosted with white, and when she turned her head, he could see that her eyes were clouded with age.
“That is my doing,” she said. “A gift given long ago, before your father’s father had learned to balance on his hind legs. It is not important. Why are you here, in our forest?”
“He’s supposed to kill me,” said Snow from over his head.
“Is he, now?” The old sow sounded only mildly interested. “Not doing a very good job of it, is he?”
“I wouldn’t have,” said Arrin. “I don’t know what to do. The queen is mad—crazed—a witch—” He spread his hands helplessly. “And if I do not bring her a heart as proof, she’ll kill me. And probably my aunt as well.”
The boars looked at him thoughtfully. Their eyes were small and black and glittered in the snowlight, and their breath melted holes in the crust in front of them. “She’s human,” said one of the ferals.
“It is what we said we needed.”
“She could be useful.”
“Can she cook?” asked the one, who had made the remark about girls and squirrels.
“Some,” said Snow, who could make a few simple meals on days when the midwife was too tired or annoyed to cook. The boar grinned, showing all his tusks and a vast expanse of tongue.
The boars put their heads together. Arrin and Snow heard a grumbly, snuffling conversation, so low that it seemed to come through the soles of their feet.
“It is a good thing,” said the old sow, raising her head. “I have been saying that you need a human to speak to humans for you. She will do well enough.”
Snow wanted to ask what the boars were talking about. Unlike Arrin, she was not particularly worried that she might be going mad. If the boars were talking, it was because they were talking boars. She did not have experience enough with boars to say that none of them talked. Even an unloved and unnoticed king’s daughter does not get handed a boar spear and sent out with the hounds.
But she was tired and cold and very frightened, and her heart ached in a way she could not describe. Throughout her life, she dealt with these things by becoming pleasant and biddable and occasionally climbing trees. So she did not ask.
“You,” said the sow to Arrin. “Hunter-man. There is a solution. The girl will go with my brood and speak for them. You will go back to the queen.”
“And the heart?” asked Arrin hopelessly.
The sow lowered her head. Her breath barely steamed in the cold air. “Take mine,” she said.
“What?” said Arrin. “No! I can’t!” He would not have hesitated to kill a wild boar that was terrorizing the woods, but to kill a talking and thinking being was something else entirely. “I’ll find a deer if I must—I can’t kill you!”
“Of a certainty you can,” said the sow. “The thick vein under my throat. I will lift my chin for you and you will plunge your long knife into it, and I will be dead in very little time. It is only hard to kill us when we are unwilling, you know.”
One of the boars grunted a laugh at that.
“And you—surely you all cannot allow this!” said Arrin, looking at the rest of the pigs.
One of the feral sows, striped and spotted around the middle, said, “She is mother to my mate and has been as a mother to me. I would not take the food from her mouth. Her death is her own, and more precious than food. If she chooses to have it now…” She gave a vast shrug.