Toad Words (9 page)

One was a boy. He drew breath and died, as if one breath had been enough to assure him that this was not a world he wished to live in.
 

The other was a girl. She was larger than her brother, a sturdy and healthy child from the first.

The queen waved her away when the midwife brought her, still slick and red from birthing. “Send her to the wet-nurse, fool. What are you thinking?”
 

The infant shrieked. The remains of a caul clung to her head, and she was purple and wretched and furious.

The queen stood up.
 

Her ladies-in-waiting gasped, and the midwife said, “My lady!” and put a hand on her shoulder to push her back to the bed. It was unthinkable that a queen should bear twins and immediately stand up.
 

The queen backhanded the midwife. There was little enough strength left in her hands, but the signet ring on her finger tore a line down the woman’s face. The midwife stepped back and did not touch her again.
 

The queen tottered across the room to where her mirror hung on the wall. There was a narrow table before it, and the queen braced herself against the edge, her arms trembling with exhaustion.
 

“Who?” she said to the mirror. “Who?”

The mirror chuckled.

The ladies-in-waiting crossed themselves. The midwife bowed her head over the bloody, weeping infant and walked from the room with a measured step. She had learned long ago never to run from a dangerous animal.
 

“Who, damn you?”
cried the queen.
 

“Than you?” asked the demon of the mirror, throwing back her own reflection. The queen’s face was shiny red and haggard and her hair hung down in sweaty rags across her face.
 
Her lower lip had split and she had bitten and worried it with her teeth. The circles under her eyes looked like gouges.
 

“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 steward 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.