Toad Words

by T. Kingfisher

  “At this moment, near everyone is fairer than you, O queen,” said the mirror. “Except perhaps the crone in the cow-byre and the corpse in the grave.” It chuckled again. “And the child that just slid squalling out of your womb…Yes, I think you are fairer still than she.”

  The queen laughed, one short, sharp bark. “There’s that,” she said, swaying in front of the mirror. “At least there’s that—” and she allowed her ladies in waiting to lead her back to bed.

  The queen’s daughter was named Snow, because of her skin and hair.

  She was not quite as white as snow. People that pale look like corpses, and if they insist on walking around, other people tend to put stakes in their hearts and bury them under a very heavy stone. But she was at least the color of a rose petal, one of the soft ivory ones with a blush of pink near the center, and that is very pale indeed.

  Her hair was paler yet, so white-blonde as to be nearly colorless. Her eyelashes were invisible. When she was pink and flushed, which was often, her eyebrows stood out like scars across her face.

  She was not a pretty child, and this suited the queen, on the few occasions when she thought about Snow at all.

  The queen had no maternal instincts whatsoever. As the midwife said, this could only be considered a blessing.

  The wet nurse weaned her as early as humanly possible and dumped her unceremoniously on the midwife. “Said she didn’t want the queen to have any reason to come looking for her,” said the midwife gloomily to the head gardener. “And who can blame her, but what am I supposed to do with a child? I’m good at getting them out of people, but after that I’m done with them.”

  The gardener stifled a laugh. It was true. The midwife did not like children. But as Snow didn’t like them much either, it worked out well enough.

  Snow was a pleasant, biddable child right up until she wasn’t. Once she made up her mind about something, gods and devils could not move her. “Stubborn like a rock,” the midwife said to the gardener. “It’s not that she argues with you. Everything just bounces off her, and then she goes and does whatever she was planning to do anyway.”

  “The apple tree,” said the gardener.

  “The apple tree,” said the midwife, sighing.

  There was one apple tree in the courtyard outside the castle gardens. It was a single tree with a gnarled and splitting trunk, caged in a little ring of cobbles. Snow loved it.

  She climbed it. She hid in it, as well as one can hide in an elderly apple tree. The hunters grew used to riding in and seeing a pink face with very white hair peering at them from between the leaves. First the gardener and then the midwife had tried to ban her from the tree—she would fall and break her neck, she would damage the tiny budding apples, she would be stung by the bees that crowded around the blossoms in spring. Snow agreed solemnly to all of these things, often while in the act of climbing the tree again.

  Eventually, they gave up. Snow was allowed the run of the apple tree. In earliest autumn, she would stuff herself on green apples and become violently ill, and the midwife would make up a nasty-tasting potion from the herbs in the garden and force her to drink it down.

  “And it’s no more than you deserve,” she said severely, watching Snow, who for once had gone much whiter than her hair.

  “I know,” said Snow, pleasant and biddable as ever, drinking the potion and planning her next escape.

  After Snow was born, the queen barred the king from her bed. Don’t ask me how. The demon in the mirror may have told her a way. It was old and cold and had been bound in the mirror-glass for a long time, and had seen many witches come and go. A few of them had even been queens.

  The queen’s witchblood came from an ancestor many years removed, who had loved a troll and been loved in return with little thought for the consequences. The blood of trolls and mortals mixes strangely, and such is the nature of witchblood that it twists and turns and doubles back on itself, so that one child may grow up strange and fell and not a drop be found in the veins of her siblings.

  The queen’s blood ran thin and hot, and when she had found the mirror, she had no thought but to use it. The demon did not have to seduce her with words or visions; she came essentially pre-seduced. This offended the demon’s notion of its own craftsmanship, but it did save time.

  Other than the mirror, there were very few signs of the queen’s nature. The touch of iron did not burn her, although she disliked it, so she avoided knife blades and the great wrought-iron candelabras in the great hall. A sword or a plow might have caused her actual pain, but she stayed in her bower and the issue did not arise. Banishing her husband from her bed also banished the last bits of iron that she came in contact with regularly—buckles and snaps and studs and so forth—and so she continued in greater comfort.

  The king, who now spoke three or four words a day, if that, said nothing of this new arrangement. Perhaps it suited him as well.

  He was not kind to his daughter, nor unkind. Snow was not actually sure that he knew she existed.

  She would have been surprised to know that he was very aware of her existence, and that it troubled him. If he had died childless, the kingdom—for what little it was worth—would have gone to a distant cousin. An annoyance, but there it was.

  Having a daughter complicated things. Ruling queens—queens who ruled in their own name, that is, rather than by proxy for a son or absent husband—were rarer than hen’s teeth in that age. Unless Snow could have swept in as a warrior queen with an army at her back, she was unlikely to hold the land at all. So the kingdom would go to whomever Snow married, and the king, who had a very bitter view of marriage by now, did not like to think of it.

  When Snow was fifteen, the king left the castle. It was said by some that he went on crusade, but in the stables and among the king’s huntsman, they said that the crusade he had gone on was to find a new wife, one who could bear him an heir.

  I do not know what their leave-taking was like. The great oaken door to the queen’s bower was closed. The noises that came behind it caused the servants to cross themselves and hurry past. The king rode out the next morning without speaking, and the queen kept to her bed for two days.

  On the third day, she began her rule.

  It was a bad time in the castle. One would think that the servants might leave, but in fact, few of them did. Most of them had nowhere to go, and some of them owned their own small cottages outside the castle walls—owned them free and clear, by grant of the king’s great-grandfather—and the thought of leaving and condemning their own children to live as serfs was a hard one.

  So they banded together as best they could to temper some of the worst of her excesses.

  The first time she ordered an execution, the master-at-arms and the steward and the chief huntsman stared at each other across the great table in the kitchen, while the cook prowled behind them. It was the master-at-arms who said, “We cannot do it.”

  “The lad wasn’t trying to murder her,” said the cook, holding a meat cleaver in her thick fingers. “It was a chicken bone, for god’s sake. A chicken bone!”

  “She choked on it,” said the steward.

  “Would that it had killed her!” hissed the cook, which was treason, and treason tripled when the three men nodded.

  They did not speak for a little time, while the cook prowled with her knife.

  “I cannot order my men to kill a kitchen boy,” said the master-at-arms at last.

  “Perhaps there is another way,” said the huntsman. He was younger than either of the others and had less contact with the queen.

  So the kitchen boy was smuggled out in a hay-wagon, and a false grave dug by the huntsman and the master-at-arms. The tall, stoop-shouldered steward told no one how badly his gut had churned when he approached the queen in her bower and said, “It is done, my lady.”

  “Good,” said the queen, staring into the mirror. “Good.”

  She did not stop brushing her hair when she spoke.

  The stewar
d would speak those words several more times over the next few years, and would thank all the saints and the little household gods that the queen did not wish to watch the executions herself.

  Once, when she ordered a clumsy footman to have his hand chopped off, she asked to see the hand. The steward said, in his patient, colorless voice, “Forgive me, my lady. I did not think to preserve it for you. It has been burned.”

  “A pity,” said the queen, turning back to her mirror.

  The steward informed her two days later than the footman had died of infection from the stump. The huntsman had, in fact, ridden out with him a day earlier and left him—hands very much intact—at the crossroads leading away from the kingdom.

  “A pity,” said the queen again, and continued to brush her hair.

  Another way that the servants defied the queen was in the matter of Snow.

  Snow was largely kept from the queen’s sight, because it was easier for everyone. The midwife lived in a little detached cottage—one of a number of small buildings that straggled about the castle like lost goslings. The cottage fronted onto the herb garden, because in addition to delivering babies, the midwife brewed a great many potions and possets for the people of the kingdom. The head gardener had been trying for years to get her to marry him and move into the bigger house on the other side of the garden, which had stone floors and real glass in the windows. But the midwife preferred to stay in her own cottage and tend the herb garden, although she was not above spending the night at the gardener’s house once or twice a week.

  Snow grew up in the little cottage. The steward carefully set aside a room in the castle for her, as far from the queen’s bower as possible, and suggested that Snow consider moving into it, for appearance’s sake. Snow smiled and thanked him, and continued to live in the little cottage by the herb garden.

  What she did not say was that she could not sleep in the castle, that laying in the large, richly appointed room made her skin itch crazily over her muscles and her mind run in ragged little circles all night long. There was no rest for her in the castle. Her mother was mad—the servants all said so—and her father was gone and had not noticed her even when he was present.

  So the maids changed the linens weekly and straightened nonexistent clutter, and Snow learned to weed an herb garden, and the queen gazed into the mirror and ordered her servants killed.

  Snow was seventeen when things changed.

  She had lately outgrown her clothes. Her skirts came up so high that she could have waded a stream bone-dry, and her shirts did not want to close on top without extra lacing. Winter was beginning in earnest, and there was not a single jacket that could fit her across the shoulders. The midwife went to the steward and informed him of this, and the steward went to the seamstress and ordered new clothing made.

  Most of it was good solid peasant stuff, as the midwife had demanded, but the steward had not forgotten that Snow was a princess, and he knew that the day might come when she was required to look like one. So among the skirts and kirtles and underclothes, there was a gown with a blue bodice and puffed sleeves. (The seamstress had always had a great desire to sew something with puffed sleeves, and the fact that Snow stared at them with great astonishment and mild indignation did nothing to diminish her moment of glory.)

  “Try it on,” said the seamstress. “Oh please, Snow, try it on.”

  Snow sighed. It was an absurd dress and she was certain that she would look ridiculous in it, but if it would make the old woman happy…well, it was little enough. And the other skirts had been very good. She bowed her head like a horse to the harness, and allowed the seamstress to pin her into the dress.

  “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.