“What is this? Do you want me to come with you?”
“Not if you’re afraid of pigs.”
“Oh, please. Why would anyone be afraid of pigs?”
“Then you’re coming?”
“I didn’t say that!”
“I dare you,” said Saiet. “I dare you to come visit this pig.”
“How old are you, nine?”
“Nine is quite mature,” he said, “for a pig.”
“Oh, kittens,” Lovisa said, borrowing the queen’s favorite expletive. Then, unable to hold it back, she laughed, a quick, exasperated breath. “What’s wrong with this pig?”
* * *
—
The problem with the pig was that an endless stream of piglets was popping out of it.
“That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” Lovisa said, watching Saiet wipe bloody sacs away from the mouths and noses of the little piglets, rub them with towels, tie off their umbilical cords. She couldn’t believe she was here watching this, and she couldn’t stop talking. How could he touch those things? “They look like slugs. They look like pink poops!”
“What, have you never seen a piglet before?” said the farmer who owned the pig, resting her heavy boot on a bucket, chewing on a piece of straw. “City people.”
“Here, warm this one up,” Saiet said, holding a teeny-tiny piglet out to Lovisa, then actually looking rather angry and stern when she cringed away. “Warm it!”
“All right,” she said, “all right!”
She took the tiny thing in her hands, suddenly petrified she’d hurt it, drop it, squeeze it too hard. The piglet was wrapped in a soft towel. It wasn’t very warm, so she brought it to her chest and tried to cradle it in her arms. Its eyes and mouth were tiny wrinkles and its miniature nose was the funniest, strangest thing she’d ever seen.
“Why do people like babies?” she demanded.
No one answered her, for Saiet and the farmer were busy with the other piglets, of which there were impossibly many. They just kept popping out, as if any pig had business being so pregnant. What if this one, out of all of them, was the one that didn’t survive? What would it mean about the kind of person she was? She found a bench nearby and opened her coat, so the piglet could nestle into her body heat. She imagined a shield around this piglet. A shield made of her arms, and her iron will.
“All right,” she whispered to it, very quietly, so no one else could hear. “It’s you and me, piglet. Okay? You need to survive. Okay? Survive. You are worthy.”
* * *
—
That afternoon, when Lovisa stepped back into Nev’s house with a piglet in her arms, she fended off the curious looks, and especially the amused looks, with a chilly kind of hauteur.
“It’s the runt,” she said. “The farmer didn’t want it.”
“I see,” said Giddon unperturbedly, for Giddon was the person she’d happened to be glaring at when she’d made her announcement. He was sitting at the table with Nev and the queen. Probably planning their departures.
“It’s cute,” said Nev.
Lovisa glanced at the fox kit Nev held in one arm and said caustically, “Yes. I like that it can’t read my mind.”
“Have you named it?” asked Bitterblue.
She had named it. In fact, she’d named it after the queen. “His name is Worthy,” she said, then, before she started to cry again, went out to the barn.
Nev came looking for her later, without her fox.
“Lovisa?” she said, finding Lovisa in the semi-dark, where she was sitting on the hay beside the cow again. She was teaching Worthy to suckle on a milk-soaked cloth from Saiet that she twisted like a nipple.
I cannot believe this is my life, Lovisa thought as Nev approached her. “What?”
“An airship’s coming tomorrow from Ledra,” Nev said. “We’re leaving the day after that.”
Lovisa grunted. It was so soon. Too soon.
“Will you come with us?” Nev asked.
How confusing it was to hear Nev say that. “I—don’t think I have anywhere to go,” she said.
“The Devrets want you, if you like,” Nev said. “You could live with your brothers. The academy also wants you back.”
Lovisa snorted at that. “Says who?”
“Says every message coming through the signal stations.”
“The people at the academy just want to be able to look at me and gossip,” said Lovisa. “I can’t go to Ledra. You know how it is there.”
“Yes,” Nev admitted. “I do.”
“Anyway, how could I?” Lovisa said. “Everyone’ll know who I am. They’ll know what I did, and what my parents did.”
Nev seemed to think about that for a minute. She stroked the cow’s neck and the cow took on a blissful expression. Lovisa watched carefully while pretending not to. She’d wondered the safe way to touch that cow.
“It’s true that I can’t imagine what this is like for you, Lovisa,” Nev finally said. “You’ve had to make harder choices than I ever have, harder than most people ever do. But I don’t want you to think that you’re alone.” She paused. “I understand you might not consider me a friend.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Lovisa through rising tears.
“If you come back to school,” said Nev, “you won’t be alone.” She paused again. “Okay? Just think about it.”
She left for the house. Then, while Lovisa was thinking about it, Nev came out again, poked her head into the barn.
“Lovisa? Your uncle is here.”
* * *
—
When Lovisa entered the house with Worthy in her arms, Katu was sitting in a chair by the fire. He was clean, his hair newly cut, but he was so small, so thin.
His eyes touched the piglet and he began to laugh, coming to Lovisa, embracing her. They’d never really had an embracing sort of relationship, but something had changed. She hugged him back hard with her free arm.
“You look better,” he said.
“You too.”
“I’m all right,” he said. “It’s going to take me a while. I’m lucky I have brawny friends.” He flashed a smile at Giddon that was rueful, and that included Bitterblue, who sat in a chair beside Giddon. There was something odd about the smile, something stiff, that made Lovisa watch Katu closely.