Free Toad Words by T. Kingfisher Page B

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