Page 11 of Hemlock & Silver

Javier’s hand landed on my shoulder. He waited politely while I tried to pretend that I hadn’t yelped and jumped sideways, then said, “I do not think there is much cause for concern now. The danger will not truly begin until we are traveling.”

Did that make me feel better? I wasn’t sure. I took a step, then another. My guard was behind me. I wasn’t in danger yet. I would be in danger later, but not yet.

Very well. I’d deal with later when it arrived.

We took a more direct route home, passing through several wide plazas, including the Plaza of the Quail’s Fountain, which features an enormous bronze quail with water trickling out of its topknot.

It’s not good art. The quail has big goggling eyes, and the water runs down its back and over its tail and, by an unfortunate coincidence, makes it look as if the bird is peeing endlessly on the floor.

You’d think that people would laugh when they saw it, but in fact, the first reaction is usually fascinated horror.

Over the years, the plaza has become home to a rather seedy open-air market.

My theory is that if the residents complained enough to get it shut down, they’d be stuck looking at the fountain again.

My guard and I passed by blankets covered in old books, much-mended pans, and jewelry of questionable authenticity and even more questionable provenance.

Cobblers selling cheap sandals rubbed jowls with pawnbrokers and merchants hawking spices and soup mixes that were at least half sawdust.

You’d think that being among so many strangers would be nerve-wracking now that I had to worry one would kill me, but in fact, it was the opposite.

I knew this place. I had been here a thousand times.

It was normal and familiar, and I understood it, the way I would never quite understand assassins and kings.

And then, of course, there were the patent medicine people, selling cures and antidotes, hope and lies. The edge of a dozen pitches assailed my ears as we threaded our way through the stalls.

“Infallible remedy for…”

“… a recipe handed down from the time of the ancients…”

“… powdered from the horn of…”

“Just a sprinkle of this powder on a mad dog’s bite…”

Indignation chased away fear. My hands had curled into fists by the time we were out of earshot of that last one.

It wasn’t so much the man’s patter as the look on the faces of the crowd, the desperation and the hope.

“I suppose if I broke that man’s kneecaps, you’d have to arrest me,” I muttered to Javier.

He snorted, which was the first expression I’d seen from him that wasn’t apology or mild surprise. “Not effective, I take it?”

“There’s no antidote for a mad dog’s bite.”

“Ah.” We passed a half dozen gates, then he asked, “So what would you do if you were bitten?”

“Amputate immediately.”

He considered this. “Seems extreme.”

I shrugged. “People survive amputation. The only people who survive hydrophobia have had a limb so mangled that it was taken off immediately.” There had been a time when I’d thought to study hydrophobia, but it had proved even more intractable than hemlock.

“There’s nothing there, ” I tried to explain.

“You can find the venom in a snake’s fangs or a scorpion’s tail, but a mad dog doesn’t have venom glands.

And if you harvest their saliva— not an easy job—and dose a fowl with it, nothing happens.

Some scholars don’t think it’s a poison at all.

” I leaned toward that view myself, but I wasn’t confident enough to argue for it.

It was possible that I just wanted it not to be a poison, since I’d been unable to isolate it.

“Maybe it’s evil magic,” Javier said. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, so it was my turn to grunt.

I didn’t believe in magic. Any number of “magical” cures—usually obtained from markets like the last one—had proved worse than useless when I tested them.

And in scholarly work, it seemed like magic was the last resort of an author who had a pet theory that he couldn’t get to work any other way.

On the other hand, if there was ever a condition that seemed like malign magic, it was hydrophobia. Though it would say a lot about the world, if magical cures were useless, but a malign curse lived and thrived in the mouths of unfortunate dogs.

“Maybe,” I said finally. “Saints know I can’t prove otherwise.”

Javier didn’t reply. I wondered if either guard would be coming with me to the king’s estate or if they would hand me off to a new set of minders.

I didn’t know how to feel about that, so I put it on the pile of all the other things that I didn’t know how to feel about, and let it go.

Both guards were still with me when it was finally time to leave.

Two men with a wagon had come for my trunks the night before, and I watched them go, wondering if I would have a single unbroken piece of glassware remaining.

Then I slept badly—I always do, the night before I know I have to be somewhere early—and was already awake when the maid came to roust me before dawn.

The cook had made a large mess of eggs scrambled with goat cheese, onions, and peppers.

I ate at the kitchen table, alongside Aaron and Javier.

If they thought it was odd eating breakfast alongside their charge, they didn’t show it.

The cook also pressed baskets of food on all three of us, apparently concerned that we would starve to death while traveling in the king’s retinue.

Then I mounted my large, placid gelding, and my guards mounted horses that had been brought for them that morning, and we rode to the edge of the city where the procession was waiting.

A week ago, I might have thought that we’d be leaving immediately. Now I figured it would be a miracle if we were moving by noon. In fairness, it’s hard to get that many people pointed in the same direction with any speed. (Maybe the army, but I think they train for it.)

I did not feel like being fair. I sat in the saddle and chafed at the delay.

Dawn scraped its thin light over the ground, and people were still running back and forth, all of them looking as if they had Very Important Business to conduct, none of which seemed to get us any closer to moving.

Knots of people in glittering clothes stood around, looking completely unsuited for a ride in the desert. I couldn’t see the king anywhere.

The city of Four Saints doesn’t have city walls, except that this part of it does, but they’re to keep out the desert, not invaders.

The wind blows from the south more often than not and carries dust with it, so the wall was put up to keep it out as much as possible.

On the desert side of the wall was the large open space that caravans left from.

It was called Snake’s Hearth—don’t ask me why.

The sun rose over white ground and the intricate little puzzle of desert shrubs, which grow almost-but-not-quite touching each other. As color leached into the landscape, I could make out the bright paint of the spirit houses on their poles, dotted all through the shrubs.

Spirit houses, in case you don’t know them, are how we dispose of our dead in Four Saints.

There just isn’t enough good farmland to spend any of it on the dead, and if you chop holes in the desert, it takes a hundred years for things to grow back.

The saints don’t like that. The story goes that Saint Rabbit, in particular, doesn’t like it, and was enraged by humans cutting up the desert for the dead, so Saint Bird intervened before Rabbit sent His thousand children to eat up our crops.

In Her guise as Saint Wren, Bird taught humans to burn their dead, and the ashes were placed in spirit houses, which, not coincidentally, resemble birdhouses.

A spirit house is a little box on a pole, with holes drilled in the sides and a roof over the top.

You place the ashes of the deceased in the box, and as the wind blows, they sift out of the holes and across the desert.

When the ashes have been completely scattered, the period of mourning is considered done.

(This does mean that if your loved ones die during the rainy season, you will probably be mourning them for a lot longer than if they die in the windy season.)

Occasionally a bird will take up residence in a spirit house. It’s a sign of favor from Saint Bird, since She is the one who carries souls to the afterlife. Some spirit houses are designed specifically to encourage bird nests, but that’s considered rather tacky.

Saint Bird has dominion over the lungs and the breath, the way that Saint Adder has dominion over the heart.

There are lots of folk remedies for pneumonia that involve burning old bird’s nests.

Healer Michael despairs of it, because the last thing you need when you have pneumonia is smoke, but people still do it.

I had looked for ways to empower struggling lungs, the way that chime-adder venom empowers a struggling heart, but had never turned up anything much.

If you burn a feather and capture the smoke, then cool it, you get a tar-like substance so nasty that I hadn’t even tried to test it.

There’s no point to a cure that no one can get down.

The nearest spirit house was painted bright turquoise with slashes of yellow. The shadows under it gradually darkened, then grew shorter and shorter as the sun rose overhead, until, by the time we were finally ready to ride out, its shadow was barely wider than my hand.

“We could have slept in,” I muttered to my guards.

Aaron snorted. Javier gave a minuscule exhale that might have been a sigh.