Page 13 of Hemlock & Silver

I didn’t regret my choice of clothing, having just seen how the road treated gems and cloth of gold, but I did feel a brief pang that I didn’t have a fancier horse.

The king was mounted on an elegant gray mare, and I was riding Ironwood, who was basically a sofa with hooves.

I felt immediately guilty at the thought and patted his neck.

Ironwood was a good animal, damn it. Horses weren’t like ball gowns you swapped out as the mood suited you.

“And how are you faring today, Mistress Anja?” the king asked.

“Oh… uh… fine, Your Majesty.” I cast around for some observation to make, and settled on, “It’s very dusty, though.”

“Yes,” he said, even though at the head of the column, he had much less dust to contend with. “Do you ride often?”

“Now and again. Mostly when I need to visit the hospital. It’s a long way to walk.” Oh, this was excruciating. I wasn’t good at small talk at the best of times. “Do you ride often, Your Majesty?”

“Not as often as I’d like,” he said ruefully. “When I was younger, it seemed like I was in the saddle every day, going somewhere to oversee something vital. Now everything vital comes to the palace, and by the time I think, ‘I wanted to go riding today,’ it’s already dark.”

“It’s easy to get caught up in work,” I agreed.

“I imagine you see patients regularly.”

I shrugged. Then it occurred to me that one did not simply shrug off inquiries from the ruler of the country, so I cleared my throat. “Not regularly, no. The temple only sends for me when they suspect a poisoning. Sometimes I’ll go months without seeing any at all.”

“How many patients have you seen, then?” the king asked.

“Eighty or ninety,” I said. “Perhaps as many as a hundred. I would have to consult my notes.”

“And how many of those have you saved?”

(The last thing Isobel had said to me before I left was “Try to be tactful.”

“I always try ,” I protested.

She gave me a Look. “Try harder.”)

Tact. Yes. Don’t you think you should have asked me this before you hired me, Your Majesty? I thought, but did not say. I studied my hands on the reins instead, admiring how calm they looked, how they failed to clutch nervously at the leather. “Sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” The king’s voice did not quite go shrill at the end, but it came close. His mare sidled a little in surprise. “Out of a hundred ?”

Tempting as it might be to teach the king a lesson about checking one’s credentials in advance, I had no desire to be known as the woman who had killed eighty-odd patients.

“You misunderstand me, Your Majesty. The vast majority lived—but they would have done so anyway. At best I helped speed their recovery a little, but I can hardly be said to have saved lives that were never in danger.”

“Oh.” The king relaxed. So did Aaron. I wondered at myself, daring to alarm a king. Perhaps it was revenge, however petty, for how he had alarmed me in my workroom.

“Your modesty is becoming,” the king said. “Most physicians would simply claim credit for all of them.”

I shrugged. “I’m not really a physician. I’m a scholar who has studied antidotes at great length. As I told you the other day, most of what people think is poison really isn’t. If I took credit for every bellyache that got better, I’d be no better than a charlatan.”

Aaron cleared his throat, glanced at the king for permission, and said, “You said the vast majority got better. I assume some didn’t?”

Clever Aaron. Of course, he’d seen one of them. “Nineteen,” I said. Now my fingers did tighten on the reins, the knuckles going white. I watched them from a little distance, then loosened each one individually until they lay easy again.

The king had learned something, it seemed. When I looked up, I saw his gaze intent on me. “And how many of those could have been saved?”

I sighed. “With what knowledge we have? Perhaps none of them. There are still too many poisons that have no cure.” I could feel my shoulders hunching, and I lowered them as consciously as I had relaxed my hands.

“Mushrooms… prussic acid… poison hemlock. There’s little enough that can be done for any of them, except to ease the victim’s passing. ”

“But you have been able to save a few,” the king said.

I nodded, feeling curiously reluctant to admit even that much, as if saving lives was a moral failing instead of a victory.

We rode for a little way. Despite the awkwardness, I was very pleased not to be breathing dust.

“What poison do you see most often?” the king asked after a time.

I had to think about that. “In children, probably arsenic. Toddlers getting into flypaper or rat poison. Adults vary more. Mushrooms are rare but tend to get whole families at a time. They don’t grow around here, they come in dried, so it’s impossible to tell what they are.

Someone buys a package that includes a dried Saint’s Tear and makes soup, and forty-eight hours later, you can practically pour the liver out of the bodies. ”

The king swallowed.

It occurred to me that was possibly a little more graphic than he’d been expecting. “Err… sorry, Your Majesty.” Really, I don’t know why that would bother him. He’s killed people in battle, hasn’t he? Probably stabbed a fair number of people through the liver. Possibly including his wife.

“Does that happen often?” he asked. “The mushrooms.”

“I’ve seen it twice. Nine people total.” I spread my hands. “When you think about how much dried mushroom is shipped into the city, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”

“Ah. Not something that requires royal action, do you think?”

I blinked. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that I might, with a word, influence policy throughout the kingdom.

“Um. No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure what could be done anyway.

” What did require royal action? “If Your Majesty really wanted to cut down on poisonings, banning using honey or sugar water to coat flypaper would do a lot more good. Then toddlers wouldn’t lick it so much. ”

He gave me a terrifyingly thoughtful look. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

We stopped that night at a shrine to Saint Toad.

It wasn’t a large shrine, but it boasted a spring that would let us water the horses, which was important.

Saint Toad has dominion over the melancholic humor and the bowels, and laxative bottles often have toads stamped on the labels.

People make pilgrimages to the big Toad shrine to the west of Four Saints mostly to ask for wealth, which is also His domain, but more than a few go to ask for regularity.

(I am not here to judge. In the course of testing things on myself, I’ve had more than one occasion to beg for Saint Toad’s intervention.)

I was surprised to discover that the king’s entourage had been here already and erected dozens of tents.

My guards showed me to one that was practically a pavilion, a two-room construction in a startling shade of red.

There was a basin and a brazier and a chest, presumably in case I wanted to unpack one of my travel chests, then repack it in the morning.

This seemed excessive, given that all I was going to do was sleep here for one night, but I didn’t complain.

Javier and Aaron had cots in the front room.

I started to complain about that, then remembered what Javier had said about things not becoming truly dangerous until we were traveling.

The guards were sleeping there so that they were between me and anyone who wanted me dead.

I had succeeded in pushing off my fears until later. Now later had arrived, and I wasn’t somehow magically equipped to deal with it. Poor planning on my part, clearly.

I stared at the ceiling of the tent for about five minutes. There was dark purple trim layered over the red walls. It looked expensive. Someone might try to kill me. Maybe being royalty means you have fancy tents as a matter of course. Also, someone might try to kill me.

Stop that, I told myself. You’re not going to do any good if you stand there panicking. Do something useful.

Useful. Yes. Someone might try to kill me, but I could still be useful until they succeeded.

I unwrapped the chime-adder’s cage and fetched a dish of water.

This was actually quite centering, because you cannot be distracted while working with a venomous snake.

I slid a thin piece of board in to wall off half the cage, set the dish in, pulled the board out, and snapped the lid down.

It took about a minute, during which time I did not think about people trying to kill me.

Unfortunately, after the minute passed, the thought came back again, and I still had no idea what to do with it.

I watched the chime-adder slowly uncurl, all blunt head and flickering tongue.

A living saint, small enough to keep in a cage, the cold, dry melancholic humor made flesh.

She wore the same colors that I did, browns and earth tones, with a pattern of pale chevrons along her back.

Young chime-adders were an elegant little deadliness, all nerves and whiplash speed, but mine was old and thick-bodied and, insomuch as a venomous snake can be, even-tempered.

She was in a bad mood today, though, probably because of all the jostling around on horseback.

She’d struck at the board twice, her tail ringing a carillon, and now eyed the water dish as if it were personally responsible.

I felt a pang of sympathy. I, too, would have liked to bite some thing, and I didn’t know who was responsible. No one had ever wanted me dead before. How was I supposed to feel?

I still hadn’t figured that out when Aaron put his head through the flap and told me, almost apologetically, that I had been summoned to dine with the king.