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?
Her breath caught in her throat.
“You may sleep beside me, if you wish,” said the spotted sow. Her face was unreadable, but her voice was kind. “Or beside the fire, there, where it is warm.”
“Thank you,” whispered Snow.
Snow had not slept beside another living creature since the wet nurse had handed her over to the midwife. It was too strange a concept in a day of strangeness. She crept beside the fireplace, where there was a little nook in the wall, and pulled Arrin’s jacket tight around her. She turned to put the stones against her back.
The seven wild boars settled themselves about the room. They made the place seem small. A few took apples from the bin themselves and crunched them down, cores and all, before settling.
There were grumbles and grunts and low conversations, and then, one by one, they fell silent, and there was only the sound of their breathing. The fire painted orange light on their great black bodies.
A long time later, when she was sure that they were asleep, Snow caught the hem of the jacket in her teeth and began, soundlessly, to cry.
The feral sow, whose name was Greatspot, heard it, and her ears flicked in that direction in the dark. Pigs are social creatures, but they are also intensely private, and they find humans fragile and baffling, so though her instinct was to comfort, she held her peace.
The queen sat in her bower, with the pig heart in a jewelry box beside her.
She had dumped her jewels out on the vanity, careless of them, and held the box out to Arrin.
“My queen,” he whispered, placing the bloody heart within, and left nearly at a run.
She barely noticed.
The old sow’s heart was larger than Snow’s would have been, but the queen was not a woman given to overseeing the kitchens and had never seen a pig’s organs taken out and washed and ground into sausage. And human hearts are usually smaller than you think they should be (which explains a great deal), so the queen found nothing unusual in the old sow’s heart.
She laid her hand across the lid, and felt magic tingle underneath it.
“The witchblood in that one was stronger than I thought,” she said to the mirror. “It is as well I did this now,
