Page 14 of Hemlock & Silver

I was glad of the over-robes that Isobel’s seamstress had prepared for me.

Pulling one on over my traveling clothes didn’t make me look like a courtier, but at least I looked like the better sort of eccentric scholar.

I splashed water on my face and only thought, a moment too late, that if someone wanted to take me out of the picture, they could easily have changed the water out for something like lye or oil of vitriol.

Well, my face didn’t melt off, so apparently they hadn’t. That was a relief.

I hastily re-braided my hair, wondering how exactly I’d be assassinated.

A knife? Would I be walking along and suddenly feel a piece of cold metal actually inside me, down among my organs?

An arrow? That felt like being struck, I’d read, a sudden hard blow, and only later did you realize that there was a piece of wood sticking out of you.

Better than oil of vitriol, I suppose.

Arrows seemed unlikely. People would notice that you were carrying a bow, wouldn’t they?

Compared to a knife, anyway. Or maybe the assassin would just shove me off a cliff.

There weren’t really any cliffs around here, as long as I avoided climbing a mesa, but for all I knew, Witherleaf was made of cliffs stacked on top of each other.

“Are there any cliffs near Witherleaf?” I asked Aaron, emerging from my side of the tent.

He looked puzzled. “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

“It’s fairly flat,” said Javier. “Why?”

“Nothing.” I didn’t want to have to explain my catastrophizing to my guards. It would probably sound like I didn’t trust them to protect me. For all I knew, one had gone in and checked the water before I even arrived. “Let’s not keep His Majesty waiting.”

I hadn’t really expected an intimate dinner with the king, but it must be said that I hadn’t expected a pavilion full of courtiers either.

The king ate at a table on a raised dais.

It was quite an elegant table, made of polished rosewood.

I wondered how they’d transported it here.

I had plenty of time to observe it, because I was seated at the same table, along with about ten other people.

I didn’t know any of them, of course. I wondered if any of them knew who I was.

Then I wondered if one of them might want me dead.

My palms began sweating, and I rubbed them on my knees.

I was sitting on the king’s left, a far more honorable position than I’d expected. I had a feeling that a great many people in the tent were looking at me and speculating on who or what I was.

The woman to my left was small and definitely older than she looked.

Her skin was smooth, but the corners of her eyes and the very slight creases in her lips gave it away.

I put her somewhere in her sixties and hiding it well.

She introduced herself to me, but I forgot her name immediately.

Fortunately she was busy conversing with the gentleman on her other side, so I didn’t have to pretend I remembered it.

The servants brought out plate after plate. There were chickens stuffed with almonds and dates, dishes of thin rattail radishes pickled in sweet vinegar, and a magnificent slab of beef. Beef is expensive stuff compared to goat or lamb. Perks of being king, I suppose.

The dishes themselves were glazed a beautiful green, with an almost glassy sheen.

Lead glaze. I looked at the cup in front of me, also green, and stifled a sigh.

It would probably be rude to ask for a cup in a different color.

Oh well, one meal’s worth of lead won’t do much. I wiped my sweating palms again.

“You need not fear poison, Mistress Anja,” said the king, perhaps mistaking the cause of my nerves. “The food comes from the kitchen under guard.”

“That is certainly one method, Your Majesty,” I said, because Isobel had told me to be tactful. It’s cute that you think that will work would not have been tactful.

I wasn’t particularly worried about poison in the food, truth be told.

Everyone was served from the same dishes on the table, so anyone trying to poison those would have to be willing to kill all the other diners in hopes of getting me.

And as for the guard… well, it would be even more difficult to poison a dish by sprinkling poison on top while it was being carried from the kitchen to the table.

Even if you were sure that you’d gotten enough onto the food to have an effect, even if it didn’t have a distinctive taste or appearance, you’d still have no way of being sure that your target would eat enough of the substance to be fatal.

Poisoning food on the spot is tricky, too, honestly.

One of the servants might palm something and slide it onto the meat, say, as they handed me my plateful, but I’d probably notice a lump of strange powder sitting in the middle of the food.

It is a sorrow to poisoners everywhere that very few substances dissolve on contact with meat.

You could probably get away with poisoning a sauce or a gravy, but it was far more likely that one of the servants would slip something into my cup of watered wine.

Hmm. I could swap cups with the woman on my left when she wasn’t paying attention, but then I’d possibly be dooming Lady…

Lady… whatever her name was. Or if someone was trying to murder her, I’d doom myself. Hmm.

I was just wondering which was more likely when she turned to me with a smile. “Mistress Anja,” she said warmly. “I am so glad to have a chance to speak with you.”

“You are?” I said, then realized a moment too late that I should probably have said something less blunt.

She laughed, a practiced trilling sound that had undoubtedly taken years to perfect.

The rest of her had probably also taken years to perfect.

Every inch was carefully polished, and she had the absolute confidence that can only be achieved by people who never have to glance in a mirror to see if they are immaculate.

Just looking at her made me feel like there was something stuck in my teeth.

“I am,” she said. “You are a woman of great mystery, you know.”

This time I managed to catch myself before blurting, Who, me? Instead I dabbed my lips with a napkin and said, “There’s no great mystery about me, I’m sure.”

“No?” She raised her eyebrows. “What takes you to Witherleaf?”

My mind went blank. I couldn’t tell her that I was going there to investigate a poisoning, could I? But then why would I go to Witherleaf at all? And why would the king have singled me out to sit at his left hand, as if I was important?

Damnation. We should have worked a cover story out in advance.

“I… err…”

“Mistress Anja will be tutoring Snow,” said the king smoothly, leaning forward to meet Lady Anonymous’s gaze. “She is a scholar of some renown.”

This was news to me, but I flashed him a grateful look. He smiled slightly and went back to speaking to the man on his right. I wondered if there was some skill that you learned as king that let you listen to multiple conversations at once and break into one at the exact right time.

“A scholar?” Lady Anonymous smiled warmly. “How interesting! What is your field?”

“Natural history,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie. I do study a great many plants, animals, and minerals.

“What fascinating work. And teaching young minds! I admire that.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“Children are such a blessing.”

“Mmm,” I said again. The problem with being plump, middle-aged, and a woman was that people expected you to be motherly, as if that was your default state.

I am not. I am actually terrible with children.

On the other hand, I have saved the lives of multiple toddlers who licked flypaper, which I feel should count for something.

“Do you have any children of your own?” Lady Anonymous asked.

I bet she wouldn’t have asked Scand that. “No.”

That must have come out a little too abrupt, because she pursed her lips sympathetically. “Oh, my dear, I’m sorry.” She patted my arm.

I looked at her blankly, wondering what on earth I was supposed to say next. “I keep venomous snakes instead?” I offered.

That was probably not the right thing to say. Lady Anonymous paused for just a fraction of a moment, then carefully took her hand away from my arm. “How… interesting.”

“It can be.” I wondered idly how many poisons went into her cosmetics.

Antimony for the eyelashes, arsenic for face lotion…

probably not belladonna for the eyes, since her pupils look normal…

Her skin didn’t have the hard, polished pallor of ceruse either.

That particular horror had fallen out of fashion, thank the saints.

Nasty stuff. The main ingredient is white lead.

One of my early patients had been an older woman who insisted on using it to cover age spots.

The skin on her face had been peeling and mottled like old paint from the lead poisoning, so of course she’d apply even more ceruse to hide it, and so on.

She lived, but her family had needed to take the ceruse away from her. Vanity takes some people strangely.

Lady Anonymous turned to the gentleman next to her, who acquired the expression of someone facing the headsman’s axe. Then she paused and turned back to me. “Isn’t that dangerous?” she asked.

“The snakes? You need to know how to handle them, that’s all.” I took a sip of watered wine. Behind her, the man glowed with the joy of a last-minute reprieve. “It’s like horses,” I said.

Again she started to turn, then curiosity clearly dragged her back against her will. “Horses?”

“People are killed by horses all the time. Bad falls or kicks or whatnot. But we don’t think of horses as being dangerous, because people mostly know how to handle them.”