Toad Words (10 page)

“Ohhhhh,” said the old woman, pulling the last pin out of her mouth. “Oh, Snow, you look like a queen!”

“Ha!” said Snow. She turned to look in the mirror and found that the dress made her look much more ridiculous than she feared—what
was
going on with those sleeves?
 

“Of course, your hair should be longer…” the seamstress said, pulling Snow’s thin, flyaway white hair back against her neck. “Perhaps with a dark blue ribbon…”
 

Snow sighed heavily. She supposed the color was all right. She didn’t look quite so wretchedly pink, and since it was winter, she had not been out in the sun all day and her last sunburn had faded, and at least her awful white eyebrows had started to darken a bit in the last few years.
 

But the sleeves were regrettable. There was no getting around that.
 

“You’re beautiful,” said the seamstress firmly, picking up another handful of pins.

“Can I go now?” asked Snow.

It was sheer bad luck that at this moment, the queen sat in front of her mirror and asked “Who?”

The mirror yawned. It was bored. The queen’s vanity was only occasionally amusing. “I hear the goosegirl is very lovely,” it said.
 

The queen tapped the bone handle of her hairbrush on the table. “Don’t waste my time, mirror. The goosegirl is pretty, but she is simple, and will spread her legs for anyone who brings her a sugar cookie. I am not concerned about the goosegirl.”

The reflection in the mirror looked more or less like the queen, but it seemed to have a great many more teeth, and they were longer and narrower, although the demon would have considered it quite gauche if they were actually
pointed.
It also seemed to have rather more tongue than was normal, so that its smile was a mass of crimson and ivory.
 

The demon cast its mind out, searching for a way to needle the queen’s vanity… and came back with something unexpected.

“Snow,” it said, sounding a little surprised itself. “
Snow
is fair.”

“Snow?” said the queen. For a brief moment, all she could think of was real snow, the white powdery stuff settled like a blanket over the forest. Then she remembered—“Snow? The girl?”

“Your daughter,” said the demon, pleased. “Yes. She is very fair in her new gown of blue.” (It decided not to say anything about the sleeves.)
 

The queen went red, then white. Even in her paleness, however, she was not so pale as Snow, and the mirror knew this, and grinned even more widely.

“She is a child,” said the queen, her voice grating in her throat. “She is what—twelve? Thirteen?”

“She is seventeen,” said the mirror. “You are growing older, my queen.” And its grin spread so wide that it seemed to stretch beyond the bounds of the mirror, as if it must crack the walls on either side.

“I must go,” said the queen, in a high voice. She set down the hairbrush with a click on the vanity, and for the first time in her life, she went in search of her daughter.

She found Snow in the little room off the kitchen where the herbs were put to drying. She swept through the kitchen—“My queen!” said the cook—and followed the stirrings of her witchblood, like calling to like, until she found herself in the doorway of the herb room.

“It will be just a moment,” said Snow, who had her back to the door and thought that it was the midwife. “I’m just bottling the last batch up now.” She was bottling nothing more complicated than oil with herbs to give it flavor, but it had been an excuse to get away from the seamstress, who was already having visions of another gown, perhaps with enormous slashed sleeves belling away from Snow’s wrists.
 

The queen said nothing. Snow was wearing one of the new kirtles, which fit snugly around her breasts and waist, and the light was the generous and flattering light of a half-dozen candles. The shadows fell kindly across Snow’s cheeks and her hair seemed to glow in the darkness.
 

Snow held up the last bottle, stuffed with dark green leaves, and turned towards the door, smiling.
 

The queen saw that she was fair.

The smile wavered for a moment, as Snow searched her memory for who this woman was, and why she seemed familiar and somehow terrible, and then suddenly she thought
the queen, it is the
queen,
here!
and her smile died completely.

They stared at one another for a moment, and then Snow sank into a curtsey. It wasn’t a very good one, which the queen noticed with satisfaction, but the treacherous candlelight molded itself along the line of Snow’s throat and all the queen’s pleasure turned to ashes.

“Your Grace—ah—”

The queen reached out and caught Snow’s wrist and pulled her hand up.
 

What is she staring at?
Snow wondered.

The queen was staring at her daughter’s hand. It was a young hand, still, the backs dimpled at the knuckles, the fingers round and smooth and still faintly slick from cramming herbs into bottles of oil.

The queen’s own hand, holding Snow’s wrist, had deep hollows along the back, with the tendons standing out in sharp relief and the knuckles cutting hard diamonds in the skin. They were not old, but they were the hands of a woman who was no longer young.

Under her fingers, the queen could feel Snow’s pulse. The witchblood in her was very weak, lying like a drift of spider silk across her veins. This girl would never need to fear the touch of iron, or at least, not more than any other mortal.
 

“Your Grace?” asked Snow.

The queen dropped her wrist as if burned and turned and stalked from the room.
 

The entire encounter had lasted less than a minute.
 

It had not occurred to either of them that Snow might call her “Mother.”
 

The queen brooded in her bower for three days, and then she summoned the chief huntsman to attend her.

The huntsman’s name was Arrin, and he did not love the queen. He owned his own cottage, out of sight of the great looming castle, and under the law of the land, the queen could not take it from him. Still, he dared not disobey, because the right of hunting the forest was the monarch’s to give or take away, and he did not wish to be reduced to poaching to survive.
 

He thought sometimes of leaving, but his aunt was very old and lived in the castle. She had never married, and Arrin did not want to leave her to die alone.
 

The queen’s summons filled him with dread, and he climbed the steps to the bower with his heart thudding in his ears. Had she learned of the servants smuggled away? Was he going to his death?

He could have overpowered the queen if she had been merely human, but the castle-folk knew of the mirror and knew that she was not quite mortal, and they feared what powers she might stir in her own defense.

Arrin stood for a long few moments before the door. The heavy oak was spattered with knots and looked as if small animals were living in the grain and gazing out at him with round, frightened eyes. He took a deep breath and went in.

The queen was gazing into the mirror and combing her hair. “Huntsman,” she said. “You have come. Good.”

The huntsman bowed deeply and waited. He could see himself in the mirror, behind the queen. His skin was dark and he wore his hair cut very short. His reflection seemed to take up less space in the mirror than it should have.
 

“The girl, Snow,” said the queen, and nothing more, while the bone-handled hairbrush moved in slow hissing strokes through her hair.

“Yes, my queen?” said Arrin finally, which the silence had gotten so thick that it lay like a coating of dust upon his tongue.

“You will take her into the forest and kill her,” said the queen, with no inflection at all. “You will do this now, at once.”
 

Arrin looked up, startled, and his eyes flicked to the mirror, and the eyes of the queen, who was watching his reflection. For a moment their gazes met in the glass, and Arrin felt a breath of ice touch the back of his neck and slide coldly down his spine.

I cannot do this
, he thought, and then
I cannot refuse or she will kill m
e, and then
I will smuggle her away, like the other servants, I will take her to the crossroads, it will be hard for her but it is better than death—

The hairbrush clicked down on the table, and he knew that he had been silent too long. “Yes, my queen,” he said.

“Bring me something,” said the queen, watching him in the mirror. “Bring me proof of her death. Her hand—no.” It occurred to her that a handless girl might still live. “Her heart. Bring me Snow’s heart, so that I know that you have done as I command.”

“Yes, my queen,” said the huntsman, and bowed his head.

Snow was gazing up into the leafless apple tree and thinking about climbing it—the first hard freeze had caught a few tiny unripe apples near the top, and those were always sweet—when Arrin rode into the courtyard on his horse and said, “Snow?”

“Hmmm?” Snow did not know Arrin well. He was young for his position, but his face was seamed and scarred, and he was often away from the castle in pursuit of game. “Yes?”

“Ride with me,” he said. “The queen commands it.”

Snow looked up at him blankly. The words made no sense. She had almost succeeded in putting the encounter with the queen in the herbary out of her mind. She had to think about each word separately and the word
queen
made a strange little space around itself in her head and did not seem to attach to the other words around it.
 

Behind his eyes, Arrin was panicking. The queen might be watching them. She could not read minds—probably—or the steward would be dead and the cook hung for treason long ago, but everyone knew that she talked to the mirror and it talked back and sometimes it told her things. Even if the mirror was not involved, she need only go to her bower window and looked down to see what was happening in the courtyard.
 

They had to go now. At once.
 

He reached down and grabbed Snow’s arms and hauled her up onto his tall mare. The horse did not much care for this, but Snow was obedient, as always, and if Arrin wanted her to ride his horse, apparently that was how it was to be. She got a leg braced in the stirrups on top of Arrin’s foot and managed to get herself adjusted over the mare’s withers. The mare snorted and stomped one foot. She was a good hunter and used to carrying heavy objects slung across the saddle, but there were limits.

Arrin tugged the reins and turned the mare toward the forest and cantered away from the castle.

It was a long ride. There was snow on the ground under the black trees. Snow grew cold very rapidly, for she was not dressed for a long ride in winter, but the horse was hot, and she wrapped her fingers in the mare’s mane to warm them.
 

Arrin waited for her to ask him where or why or for what reason.
Something
. When she did not, guilt and dread and terror mixed itself up in his stomach until he thought he might be violently ill. (He wasn’t, but mostly because he couldn’t see how it would help.)

Nearly an hour passed, and then Snow stirred and said, “Will it be much farther now?”

“I don’t know,” said Arrin.

Snow nodded, and looked back down at her hands.

He couldn’t kill her. He couldn’t. He killed deer and pheasants and boars, and once a bear that had woken too early from its winter sleep. He did not kill girls.
 

He wanted her to ask so that he could
tell
her he didn’t kill girls, because then it would be true. The fact that she did not ask and he could not say it out loud made him question it, because if he did not kill her, he would have to come back to the queen without a heart, and the queen would kill him.
 

If he did not come back, however, the queen might punish his aunt. She was entirely capable of doing so. If he had choose between Snow or his aunt…Oh, gods and saints, he could not do this.

Snow did not ask questions. She had been pleasant and biddable her entire life and it had served her well enough. And Arrin had invoked the name of the queen, and the queen’s word was law. If it was the queen’s will that she ride out into the winter woods, then she would ride.
 

She wondered where they were going.
 

Perhaps she was being sent to her father? He had ridden away some years ago, on crusade or some other errand. Snow would not be much use on crusade, but perhaps he had found a need for a daughter.
 
She sat up a little straighter. She would have preferred to bring her cloak and her comb with her, if she were riding to stay with the king, but no one would expect the queen to concern herself with such things.
 

I cannot kill her,
thought Arrin, keeping his arms well away from her body, as if she burned,
I cannot kill her, but a heart, I must have a heart, oh gods and saints, where will I find a heart to bring the queen…?

If it had been left to Arrin and Snow, they would have ridden until both of them dropped, for Arrin could hardly think and Snow would not complain. But there was a third creature involved, and the horse tired of carrying double and stopped and set her feet and blew through her nostrils in complaint. At last, Arrin’s head cleared and he drew up the reins.

“Get off,” he said, more harshly than he intended. “She needs rest.”

Snow slid down the horse’s shoulder and felt her knees almost buckle, which was interesting. She wasn’t used to that. The ground was bracken, covered with a crust of snow cut by ferns. She floundered five steps and leaned against the trunk of a tree.

Arrin dismounted as well, rubbing his horse’s neck and looping the reins up on the saddle. The mare lipped at his sleeve to show him that she forgave him for the treatment.

Snow was very cold. Riding a horse in winter is no treat, and now even the warmth of the mare’s body was gone. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered.