“I will,” said Snow. She put a hand on Greatspot and Puffball, and they walked forward, toward the town.
The cook was easy. Even though she was very different than the cook at the castle, there is a kind of universal similarity among good cooks. She came to the door behind the inn, where Snow stood with the pigs.
The cook took a truffle, rolled it between her fingers, sniffed it, and laughed out loud.
“I’d take your whole bag,” she said. “All of them, if I had a king’s ransom lying about and could afford them.”
Snow, who was getting very odd looks from the stableboy, said, “Will you take one, then?”
“I will,” said the cook. “I’ll turn my husband upside down, until he coughs up the money. And I’ll give you a plate of stew while you wait, shall I?”
Snow reached inside herself and pulled out a smile.
“Make it three,” she said.
They returned from Mousebury long after dark, the panniers weighted with many things — flour and potatoes and bags of salt and great harsh chunks of soap. (The pigs were somewhat bemused by the soap, but willing to go along with Snow’s whims.)
Elias the merchant had been honest with her — there were too many truffles for him to sell in Mousebury, and he could not buy them all at anything approaching a fair price. But he bought half the sack, at only a little less than Cook had paid, and gave her the price half in gold and half in barter. Snow felt that she had not done too badly by her friends.
“Come back in a few months,” said Elias, as she tightened the strap on a pannier and tried to balance potatoes on one side and the flour on the other side of the very patient Puffball. “Come back and bring me more, and I’ll be able to take them out to the great summer fair. Then I can buy more from you.”
Snow nodded. She did not know what to say. Would she be here in three months? Would her father have come home? But how could she leave the boars when they needed her?
But the cook had said something before she left that had given Snow sudden hope.
“You know,” said the cook, scraping the last of the stew into Puffball’s bowl, “you know, if you’ve got some truffles left to sell, you might try the convent up the road.”
“Convent?” asked Snow, surprised.
“Aye. The Sisterhood of Saint … ah … bother. Saint something. Well, there’s only about a dozen of them, but they’re decent women. A few hours walk that way. Their honey is good, but their beer is better.”
“Thank you,” said Snow, taking her own bowl of stew. “I’ll have to visit. Which way did you say?”
A convent, she thought, as the cook rattled off directions. No one cheats nuns. I’m pretty sure there’s a hell just for that. I wonder … I wonder what they’d do if they found out the boars talked … Well, I suppose they could scream “Black magic!” and try to hit Puffball with a broom. He’d probably think that was funny.
Puffball put his head up and licked the last of the stew out of her bowl, and Snow was so distracted that she let him.
She turned the thought over in her head again, as they walked home. A convent. Hmm.
Noblewomen went into convents sometimes. Snow had heard about it third-hand — so-and-so’s widow had gone to the convent, or so-and-so’s daughter. She’d never thought about applying it to herself.
Would I want to be a nun? What do nuns do? Keep bees and brew beer, apparently … I could do that … I always wanted to help the gardener with his bees, but he said they didn’t like fidgeting …
“I don’t know about these little metal things,” said Puffball, yanking her back to the present. “You can’t eat them and they’re hard to pick up. I’m afraid I’m going to swallow one if I try.”
Greatspot rolled her eyes. “It’s a human thing,” she said. “Humans love the little metal things. You get them and then humans will give you potatoes for them. Lots and lots of potatoes.”
“You can eat potatoes,” said Puffball.
“The humans might eat these metal things. Like turkeys eating gizzard stones. Don’t be rude, Puffball, not everyone has teeth like us.”
“Oh,” said Puffball, startled. “Sorry, Snow.” He pushed his shoulder against her. “You can have my metal things for gizzard stones if you want.”
Snow rubbed her hand over her face. There was something trying to get out of her chest, and when she opened her mouth, she found that it was a laugh.
It was late evening. The shadows were falling kindly. And Snow had cleaned herself up and brushed out her hair, so that she did not look too wild when she went into town, and like many people, she was almost beautiful when she laughed.
And at that moment, the queen’s fingertips lay across the magic mirror.
“Snow,” said the mirror, showing all its teeth. “Snow is still fair, O queen.”
The queen sat still, as still as one who has been dealt a mortal wound.
Very softly she said, “Snow is dead. Snow is nothing but bones in a hole.”
The mirror rippled in a shrug.
“She lives, O queen.”
The queen reached out and touched the box with the heart in it. There were smooth patches in the carving from where she had caressed it, all the long hours of the day.
(And now, reader, I will tell you that the queen was evil, surely, and the heart was a symbol of her triumph — but I cannot swear that she did not stroke the box of the heart from some strange maternal affection as well. Witchblood is twisty and those it twists have minds that turn back on themselves like brambles.)
“Then what is in this box?” she asked.
The demon in the mirror grinned. It had been waiting for this question for a long, long time.
“The heart of a pig, my queen.”
She shot
