“What do you think?” said Lovisa snappishly. “When would I ever have had occasion to visit a pig?”

“Exactly,” he said. “This could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“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.