Toad Words(30)

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 skills 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.