Toad Words(45)

“The bears are waking up,” said Arrin stubbornly. “One could smell the food and try to come in.”

“Only ever two bears in this territory, hunter-man,” said Puffball. “The old black queen died in her den, and her oldest son’s been awake for a week. He’s over on the far side of the woods, digging up roots.”

Arrin opened his mouth to argue, and Snow stopped on the doorstep of the den. “Ashes is still here,” she said. “I’ll be fine. Go talk to the king.”

He looked into the mouth of the den and saw the pale, oblong face of Ashes, the small, silent sow. She saw him looking and ducked back inside.

He mounted his horse and went to face the king.





The queen had been in the woods for several days.

She did not sleep. Her dreams the first night were all of the mirror, and she did not try again.

The leaves crunched under her feet. By day, she followed the sun and by night, she followed the burning of the witchblood. Her joints ached and the small bones of her hands throbbed with age.

Her pockets were full of apples.

She had taken them from the kitchen, from the barrel of dried apples. It did not occur to her that the cook would not recognize her, as ancient as she now was. She hobbled through the kitchens and out the gate.

The cook saw an old, old woman, her eyes glazed with madness, and did not begrudge her food. She would have spoken and asked after the old woman’s people, but there was pride in the hard, crumbled lines of her back.

That sort doesn’t like to admit she’s been reduced to stealing food, thought the cook. Poor soul! It’s only a few apples. Lord, if you’re watching, those apples are freely given. You don’t hold them against her soul.

(The cook was in the habit of lecturing the Lord, whom she considered a colleague.)

The queen crept out of the castle and away from the grounds. There was a little door by the garden, which she left open behind her. The gardener had a few things to say about that in the morning, but no one suspected the truth.

Snow’s trail was thinner than a strand of spider silk, but the queen had all the patience of madness. The days in the woods passed, one after another, as she followed the thin threads of witchblood. She raveled them up like a warrior feeling her way through a labyrinth, as though she was minotaur and maiden both.

She was not often hungry. When she was, she ate apples.

Except for one.

It had been the finest of the dried apples, the closest to whole. It took only a little magic to make the skin swell, becoming firm and green and glossy. The smell that came from it was the essence of autumn. It smelled of crisp frosts and crackling leaves.

In the heart of it, wrapped around the core like a fist around a knife-hilt, lay a spell.

The queen caressed the skin of the apple often as she walked, the way she had caressed the lid of the box that held the boar’s heart.

Her way was painful and limping. She picked up a length of green wood and used it as a staff, but there was nothing to be done about the ache in her fingers or the way that her hips joints seemed to grate inside their sockets.

The only thought that beat in her brain was Snow, Snow, her daughter with her hair like flax and her eyebrows like scars, her daughter who was sometimes fair, her daughter who had witchblood in her veins.

Blood that would remind her own what it was like to flow thin and fast and hot.

She came to a place where the scent of Snow’s blood was wrapped through the branches of a tree, and she paused there. It was the place where Arrin had dismounted, the first night that he took Snow into the woods, and where the boars had found them.

She could sense the power that clung to the boars. Almost it masked the scent of witchblood, almost she passed by. But she ran her fingertips over the bark of the tree, and the tree shuddered, and the trail that led to Snow burned like a brand before her.

“When I am young again,” said the queen aloud, “I will deal with that fool I married. Let his new wife cry over his bones.”

The thought gave her a little strength and she toiled on, one hand on the apple in her pocket.





The king’s camp was a long ride from the boar’s den. They were not terribly far from the castle, all things considered, but an army moves slower than a single man on a horse.

Perhaps the king is moving slowly, Arrin thought. Perhaps he does not want to face what waits for him at home.

He rode on. The pigs moved silently through the forest behind him.





Snow poked up the fire in the hearth, preparing an early meal. She had treated herself to dried apples drizzled with honey, which she shared with Ashes.

“And now we should probably eat something,” she said to the little white sow, “or else we’ll keep eating apples and honey all night. Not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily.”