tears on a body's face. Everyone else in the village was snug inside their hovels, sleeping perhaps and starving for certain, waiting for a break in winter's grip. Even the leafless trees shivered in the cold, shaking themselves out of dreams of spring.
Up along the path past the midden came a little bit of a man, begging tea or even water warmed over fire. What was Sula to do? She had a fire, never mind how mixed it might be with fallen bits of sky; and water she had aplenty—indeed, it seeped into her house when the rains were worst. So she fetched her dented pot and filled it with water, then put some dried kithi leaves in it and set it to simmer on the red dragon-bone fire, asking the man mite where he might be headed.
He curled thin fingers around the chipped mug she gave him, and he shivered inside his tattered cloak. He sniffed at the steam from the tea. His thin smile revealed teeth stained from chewing tanni leaves, so he'd been having a hard winter too—as if she couldn't tell that just from the size of him, with his bones too big for his skin to hold, almost. Not many in the northern reaches could find enough food to grow into their bones, but his skin was stretched tighter across his cheekbones than most.
He never said he was a wizard. He spun her a tale about heading south to the fief where his sister worked in the kitchens, where work waited for him with the hunting dogs. Had a way with animals, he did, or so he said.
'Chancy days to be on the road alone,' Sula told him.
He showed her his little knife, a silver pricker shinier than many a metal she'd seen, even in the tinker wagons where many things shone bright whether they were worth a shine or not. When she admired it, he said he'd taken the metal from a god's turd, one of the flaming stones that fell shrieking from the sky on some summer nights.
That gave Sula pause. No one she knew would touch a god's turd. One never knew what sort of magic they might leak.
'So does it carve a treat?' she asked.
'Like a hot blade through ice,' he said. He hid the knife under his cloak again and sipped his tea. 'This has a fine flavor.'
She smiled at him then. Much he might know about hounds, and perhaps about hawks and horses, but little he knew of herblore if he did not recognize the taste of kithi. 'There's more if you want it,' she said, edging away from the smoke again, with its smell like the hot red heart of a mountain. Some said smoke followed beauty, but she knew she had none. Smoke, she figured, followed wherever it pleased.
'More,' said the little man, holding out the cup.
The kithi leaves had stained the hot water a warm and welcoming dark brown. The steam smelled like night-blooming flowers and late summer fruit. She poured him a cupful of tea that could have felled a fat priest, and he drank it and slid down smiling.
No, he had never told her he was a wizard, drat the little man. Or that he had locked his heart in a box and buried it in an ice wall up north where the sun never shone and the ice never melted.
Pigs could eat almost anything, but once Kiki had eaten the thin flesh from the wizard mite's bones, and the brain from its bone box, she turned canny and slippery. After Sula ground the wizard's bones and gave them to Kiki, the pig began to murmur.
Sula didn't notice right away, preoccupied as she was with scrounging enough leaves and roots and offal to feed Kiki through her farrowing. The wizard's sky knife helped Sula slice the skin from trees, easily sliding between the outer and inner bark so that she had fine fresh inner bark for Kiki; and when the weather warmed a bit and Sula took Kiki to the forest to root, the sky knife dug down through frozen earth wherever Kiki pointed, seeking easily for the hidden treasures beneath the frost: fat juicy roots, squirrel-cached nuts, gryphon-buried kills. Never a thought did Sula give to what the sky knife might be carving into the things she and Kiki ate.
Sula and Kiki lived out the rest of the winter in comfort, thanks to the leavings of the little man from the north, and if Kiki's murmurs were more like moans than grunts, her squeals more like screams, it did not trouble Sula, who had weaving and knitting to do in the long evenings so she would have something to market come summer.
When her farrowing time came upon her, Kiki took rags and straw Sula offered her and made them into a nest at the far end of the cave Sula had carved for her out of the flank of the hill that nudged the house. Sula woke one morning to discover that the man mite's cloak was gone from where she had hung it on a peg by the door. She held a candle into Kiki's cave and peered toward the pig. The cloak had joined the nest. For a little while Sula fretted about that—the weave had been good and strong, and the cloak strangely warm—but then she decided to respect the pig's wisdom. Piglets would need all the warmth they could find, and this nest was too far from the chimney.
Whenever Sula crept toward the nest, Kiki would moan and grumble and mutter at her, shrieking louder the closer Sula came, until the pig's cries pierced the air and almost Sula's ears. Well, most pigs would protect their lying-in place; this one was just a little more protective than the others had been. She left Kiki's food on the cave floor halfway between the nest and the entrance to the house.
Six days after the winds changed direction and spring started, Sula heard the cries of young and the cooing purrs of a nursing mother from Kiki's nest, and she smiled over her knitting. More than anything she wished to count the babies so that she could make her marketing calculations, but Kiki would not let her near, even to clip the piglets' needle teeth.
She went out foraging instead and came back with an apronful of early grasses. As she crept closer to the nest she heard soft snores coming from the pig. Ah. Just a glance she could take, if she could get close enough before Kiki woke. Sula edged silently across the cave floor, holding her candle up.
Tiny and pink, eight—no, nine—small creatures lay snuggled against the pig's belly. Nine was a lovely number.
Sula spilled the sprouts from her apron. She was edging away when one of the babies woke, turned nose to the air, and wailed.
It sounded wrong.
She glanced back. Its head was too round. Its ears were too short. Its face showed in the flickering light of her candle—ugly as hunger, human as a hand print. It rolled over and pressed its mouth against a teat, quieting.
Horrified, Sula studied the others. All their heads were wrong. None of them had tails.
