Toad Words (11 page)

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.
 

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.
 

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.

The boars murmured and grunted assent. The other feral sow nodded.
 

“I am old,” said the mother sow. “I am tired. My body is strong, but my senses are covered in frost. I no longer see the falling leaves as anything but shadows. It is time.” She tilted her head back to look at Snow. “If my death means a little more than an ending—if there is someone who will speak for my brood—then it is a good death.”

Arrin gulped and looked up into Snow’s tree in mute appeal.

It seemed that she would have to be something other than silent and biddable. Snow took a deep breath, and began climbing down from the tree.
 

One by one, the boars walked up to the old sow and touched their snouts to hers. The wood rumbled with the low sound of conversation.
 

Snow stood with her back to the tree trunk, and felt terribly out of place.
 

When they had all spoken their last, the largest of the boars came up to Snow and said, “Come up on my back. Let us go.”

“Do you—do you not want to stay here?” asked Snow. “To be with her, when—”

The boar shook his head. “In the end,” he said, “we all die alone.”

Snow felt ashamed without knowing why.

She clambered onto the boar’s back, using the great bone ridge at the top of his skull for a hand-hold. He was bristly and prickly and gave off heat like a furnace.
 

“Don’t pull my ears,” he said. “Hold onto my fur.” He set out at a trot.

It was not a comfortable ride—despite all the flesh on a boar, their backs are bony—but Snow held on.

One by one, the wild pigs left the clearing with the trampled-down snow.

As they left, Snow heard the old sow say “Now, hunter-man, let me see the sharpness of your knife…”
 

She stared fixedly between the boar’s ears. The snow was beginning again.
 

A little time later, when the snow was falling thickly and the trees were black scrawls against the whiteness, they heard a distant squealing scream.

The boars stopped. One or two snuffed at the snow, and the feral sow who had spoken up leaned against one of the boars and rubbed her cheek against his.

Snow’s own boar sighed, and they began walking again through the snow.

The boars’ den was a low, dark hole in the ground, but once you were inside, it was surprisingly pleasant. There was an enormous fireplace, of stones set in clay, and if the workmanship was crude, it was still very solid. There were rushes strewn about the floor, a slab of wood that resembled a table, and several enormous frying pans hung on the walls.

“Do you cook with those?” asked Snow timidly.

“Well, if you call it cooking,” said one of the boars, and there were a few subdued snorts of laughter.
 

There was no cooking that night. They shook their bristles and settled down in heaps on the rushes before the fire. One grabbed a few logs of firewood in his teeth and tossed them onto the blaze.

The feral sow—the large spotted one who had spoken to Arrin—nodded to Snow. “There are apples in the bin,” she said, jerking her head to the back of the den. “Tomorrow, we’ll make a proper meal, but tonight we are tired and our bones are sad.”
 

“Thank you,” whispered Snow.
 

She made her way to the back of the den. It was raised slightly, almost in a walkway around the sleeping area, and there were bins there. Like the fireplace, they were crude, massive structures of clay and stone.
 

The sort of thing an intelligent boar might build without having the use of hands,
thought Snow.
 

One was full of potatoes, in actual bags. Another, narrower bin was full of oddly shaped lumps with a rich, earthy smell.

The final bin was full of apples. Snow picked one up and bit into it. It was crisp and sweet, not tart like her apple tree back home.

(
Home, home, home
… echoed in her head, half-mockingly.)

Did it still count as a home, when you had been banished from it? Was it a home, when someone there wanted you dead?