Page 24 of Hemlock & Silver

Plus, that put us right back to the question of knowing what, specifically, Snow would eat. When the cook was preparing the food herself, it would be easy, but not any longer. But Snow was still getting worse, not better.

“Do you ever send her up a tray before bed?” I asked. “Cookies or… I don’t know… hot chocolate or something like that?”

To my surprise, she shook her head. “Not since she’s been feeling poorly. She didn’t eat more than a bite or two for a while, and then the trays started being sent back untouched. I begged her to tell me if there was any treat she wanted me to make, but no matter what I make, she just picks at it.”

I thanked her for her time, complimented her sandwiches—she grinned and took a slight bow—and then went back to my room in time to dress for dinner. With the king. Again.

The footman placed a platter of delicate tidbits on the table before us—I had no idea what they were, except colorful and in layers—and another lifted them onto our respective plates. Snow lifted her fork, and I stretched out a hand. “Snow, switch plates with me, please.”

She blinked at me. So did everyone else at the table. One of the advisors started to say something, but the king cut across him. “You think…?”

“I don’t,” I said, “but I want to be sure.” For all I knew, the plates had a clear solution of arsenic drizzled on them before being set down.

Lady Sorrel took matters into her own hands by taking Snow’s plate and passing it to me.

I passed mine back. Snow gave me a thoughtful look, then began to eat.

So did everyone else, without notable reluctance.

I took a bite of mine. Something in aspic.

The layers were flavored with different fruits.

It tasted good, even if it was a trifle absurd looking.

The main course was a steaming platter of chicken in a golden sauce. Lady Sorrel took Snow’s this time. The energetic advisor turned to the king and said, “Your Majesty, would you like to trade as well?”

By dessert, it had become a game. I swapped my trifle with the king and then with Lady Sorrel. Snow’s changed hands three times, to her muffled giggles. The energetic advisor got his own dessert back again and pouted dramatically.

Snow never ate much of any of the dishes, but at least I could be fairly sure that for that one meal, she was safe.

When I arrived at Snow’s rooms on the next day, everything was the same as it had been, except that Snow had a cat in her lap and was petting it.

I had honestly never given much thought to the sort of cat that a king’s daughter would have as a pet. Something white and fluffy, maybe, with a jeweled collar and a tail like a feather duster.

This cat… was not that. It was the shade of dark gray that people call blue, it was short-haired and skinny, and it was missing an eye. Also, it had an expression like it was thinking about disemboweling everyone in the room.

“Have you met my cat?” Snow asked me.

“I have not, no.” I inclined my head politely to the cat, who gazed at me in silent contempt. Its one good eye was sulfurous yellow.

“He’s just like one back at the palace.”

“Is he?” I inched past cat and girl to my chair in the corner.

“Nurse won’t let him sleep with me at night,” Snow said, clearly aggrieved. “But he loves me.”

I try not to judge anyone, man or beast, by appearances, but let’s just say that I had significant doubts that a cat with that expression loved anything except murder.

“Now Snow, love,” Nurse said, “cats are dirty little things. And they steal your breath at night.”

“He would never . He’s the sweetest. Aren’t you?” Snow picked up his front half, her hands under his forelegs, and made him dance back and forth. The cat’s face indicated not only that murder was on the table, but that the victim had now been selected.

“And he—”

At that moment, the cat decided that he was done.

(I didn’t blame him, I’d have left as soon as the dancing started.) There was a flurry of motion, too quick for the eye to follow, and then Snow yelped and a gray blur shot past me, out the balcony door, and was gone over the railing before any of the humans could move.

“What did I say?” Nurse scolded. “And now you’ve got a scratch, and the saints help us if it mortifies. Hatha, get the salve.”

“I don’t want the salve,” Snow said sullenly, sounding rather younger than twelve. “It stings.”

“It will sting a lot more if those scratches turn putrid and the surgeon has to take your whole hand off.”

“That won’t happen.”

“No, it won’t, love, because we’re going to wash it and put the good salve on it.” Nurse shot me a glance of mute appeal.

I cleared my throat. “It’s true,” I said. “I knew a man who had to have his foot amputated because of a cat scratch.” (This was a lie. I did once know a man who’d had to have his foot amputated because of a cat bite, though.)

“There, you see?”

“It turned dark red and black, and swelled up to twice its normal size, which was quite unpleasant, because then his toenails—”

“But none of that is going to happen to you, ” Nurse said hastily, drowning out my catalog of symptoms. “Because we’re going to treat this right now .”

Snow stared at me with awed horror. “Did he die ?”

“Almost.”

She was still staring at me over her shoulder when Nurse led her into the bathing room to wash out the scratches. I settled into the chair, took out my notebook, and prepared for a long day of note-taking.

Reviewing my notes in the evening, I felt dejected.

Snow’s appetite had increased somewhat, stretching to an entire sandwich at lunch and almost half a plate of food at dinner, but that was the only thing of significance.

No, Nurse wasn’t using any home remedies.

Snow sometimes drank peppermint tea for her stomach, but I’d been through the tea, and yep, that was peppermint, all right.

My dreams that there might be aconite rolled up in the dried leaves had died before they had even properly started.

I was probably going to have to investigate the kitchens more thoroughly, which I wasn’t looking forward to.

There are just so many things in a kitchen, and the cooks tend to get very annoyed when you confiscate all the spices to run tests.

Plus, I still didn’t know what exactly I was looking for.

Snow’s symptoms were all so maddeningly vague.

Lead, mercury, arsenic, antimony—I couldn’t rule any of them out, nor the possibility of something truly exotic.

There is at least one plant that causes wasting illness if you eat the seeds for weeks on end, which seemed like a fine candidate, except that it only grows in harsh cold.

Someone could import them, certainly, but you have to eat a lot of seeds to get the effect.

This did not make it any easier to know what to watch for.

What I really ought to do was go through Snow’s belongings, but I kept shying away from that like a horse spotting a snake.

I’d had a friend when I was about sixteen, a broad, colorless girl named Lucia, who blended into the background at parties.

I wasn’t as good at blending in, but no one was asking me to dance anyway, since by that point, I was a head taller than most of the boys.

So I talked to Lucia, who had a sly sense of humor once you got to know her, and we struck up a friendship conducted a few hours at a time, between the strings of bright lanterns above the courtyard and the square red tiles underfoot.

Her mother went through her room at least once a week, convinced that Lucia was hiding something from her.

I was never clear on what the woman suspected, exactly.

Love letters, Lucia told me, or maybe a boy hiding in the closet.

Or money or maps, in case she was going to run away.

I got the impression that maybe her mother didn’t know either.

We went shopping together once and only once.

When we came home, Lucia’s mother had held out her hand and snapped her fingers as if ordering a dog, and Lucia had silently handed over her packages.

They held the most banal contents imaginable, but her mother dug through them as if she suspected Lucia of smuggling opium.

I remember her turning socks inside out, growing more and more frustrated that she wasn’t finding anything illicit.

It felt obscene, watching her paw through her daughter’s things with such bizarrely greedy hope.

Then she turned to me and held out her hand for my packages, and I took a step back, my eyebrows shooting up, and said, “Excuse me?”

She must have realized that she’d crossed some line, because she blinked at me like a woman awaking from a stupor, then backed away—but Lucia was never allowed to go anywhere with me again.

“Does she do that every time?” I asked at the next dance, while the favored spun in colorful blurs and the less favored held up the walls or congregated around the drinks table.

“Oh yes,” Lucia said calmly. “Every time. She used to pull the ribbons off my hats to make sure that there was nothing hidden under them.”

I gaped at her, but Lucia was always very calm.

I imagine she was even calm a few months later, when she van ished without a trace.

It wasn’t until I ran into her a decade later, while visiting my sister Catherine, that I learned that she had been systematically hiding her pocket money for years, until she had enough to escape to the Convent of Saint Otter, high in the mountains.

The sisters will take anyone in return for a suitable donation, and they are notoriously close-lipped.

“Are you happy?” I asked tentatively, unsure of how to respond to this stranger with my old friend’s face.

And then she smiled, and it was Lucia’s familiar smile, as if we were both sixteen again. “Very, very happy,” she said, and I was happy for her, and for a loose end finally tidied away.