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 me, 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.
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 d
id 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.”
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