Page 26 of Hemlock & Silver

I walked into Snow’s chambers the next morning, just in time to hear the sound of someone being noisily sick. I followed it past the maids, who were making up the bed with vast resignation, and found Nurse holding Snow’s pale hair as the latter was violently ill into a basin.

I did not shout, Eureka! but I admit I thought it.

When you are in the business of poisons, you learn quite a lot about vomit. It’s not my favorite part of the job, but there you are. I grabbed the basin and took it and its foul-smelling contents off to my workroom.

I will spare you the details of the next few hours, which mostly involved pipettes, reagents, and waiting for liquids to turn blue or precipitate out a yellow sludge or something .

At the end of it, I leaned back against the scarred table in my workroom and sighed.

I’d gotten my wish and witnessed a bout of Snow’s illness, and I still wasn’t any closer to an answer.

I’d run every test I had available on the previous contents of Snow’s stomach, and the only result was that my workroom needed a good airing out.

The problem is that there are just so many emetics in the world.

Arsenic makes you vomit in large doses. You can put wine in a cup of antimony for an hour, and if you drink it, you had best be near the privy.

Half the poisonous plants in the world manifest with vomiting.

(It’s the ones that don’t that you should really worry about—then you can’t get the stuff out of your system and it keeps working on you.)

I couldn’t even rule out that she’d been poisoned in such small doses over such a long period of time that her food wouldn’t contain a recognizable amount of toxin, even if it was one I could test for. Of course, three months wouldn’t usually be enough time to build up something like that…

I stopped. The chime-adder rang her bells in the silence.

How did I know it had only been three months?

I had assumed it, because that’s what the king thought. Her mother and sister had died, and then Snow got sick, and no one noticed it at first because they thought it was grief. But suppose that it was only three months ago that the symptoms had become noticeable ?

“I’ve got to talk to the nurse again,” I muttered. Then I looked around at the vomit-stained glassware, thought briefly of what that would smell like after it had a few hours, and shuddered. “First, though, I’ve got to clean this room up.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Nurse said doubtfully. “She always had a delicate stomach, like I said. There wasn’t a point where I noticed that anything changed. Not with her.”

There was a hair too much emphasis on the word her . I lifted my head from my notes. “Oh?”

Nurse fiddled with the edge of her apron. She was obviously dying to tell me, but she equally obviously didn’t want to.

“As a medical matter, it will remain entirely confidential,” I said, “unless it becomes necessary to save a life.”

It sounded somewhat pompous, but it was clearly what she wanted. She relaxed, picked up her teacup, and said, “Snow hasn’t changed. But Rose did.”

It took me a moment to remember that Rose was Snow’s sister, who had met such a tragic end. “Rose? How do you mean?”

“It was the oddest thing,” Nurse said. “Between one day and the next, practically. It was as if she forgot how to do the simplest things. Ask her to button up her coat and she’d have to stop and look at it to see where the buttons were.

She was nine years old, and of course no one’s terribly graceful at nine, but she turned clumsy overnight.

” She took a sip of tea. “I didn’t think much of it at first, of course.

Usually that just means that they’re getting some growth on.

But then she started getting lost in a castle she’d lived in all her life.

It was as if she’d forgotten which way the hallways went. ”

I frowned down at my notes. Some poisons cause disorientation, of course, but it was also possible that something had gone wrong in Rose’s brain. You expect strokes and whatnot in older patients, but that didn’t mean it was impossible to get them in young ones.

Nurse was still talking. “And she knew her letters—the king insisted—and then suddenly she didn’t. She could hardly read a word, it seemed. She was still just as sweet a child as you could ask for, but she’d been a clever one before, and then…” She spread her hands.

“Hmm,” I said. Healer Michael might know what would cause those specific symptoms, but I certainly didn’t. “What did the physicians say?”

Nurse seemed to shrink into herself. She stared into her empty teacup as if she wanted to crawl inside. “None of them saw her.”

“What?” I stared at her. “Why not? Didn’t you tell anyone what was happening?”

The teacup trembled just a little. I could see the tendons in the backs of her hands, exposed with age and lined with long blue veins. “Of course I told someone,” Nurse said, not meeting my eyes. “I told the queen.”

I sat in my workroom and stared at the wall without really seeing it.

The rooster pecked around my feet. I’d let him out for a walk around the workroom, figuring that he was probably bored and that if he got unruly, I could just close the shutters so he settled down to roost. At the moment, though, he could probably have smashed half the glassware in the place and I don’t know if I’d notice.

It didn’t take a trained scholar to put things together. Something had happened to Rose’s mind. The nurse had told the queen, and the queen had taken up a knife and killed her daughter. Hard to think that the two weren’t related.

She wouldn’t be the first woman to kill her own child.

They say that poison is a woman’s weapon, but in my experience, both sexes are likely to use it when they’re trying to be clever.

It’s just that men also occasionally beat someone to death with a hammer.

Women rarely do that. The vast majority of the time, if a woman kills someone, it’s their spouse or their child.

“It’s odd,” Michael had said to me once. “You kill your husband because you’re stuck in an abusive relationship and you’re afraid, hence the poison. Oh, once in a while you get someone looking for money out of the deal, but it’s rarer. But you kill your child because they’re part of you.”

“Eh?” I had been scrubbing the remains of an autopsy off my hands, as I recall. Even when you use gloves, there’s a sort of emotional stench that clings to your skin.

Healer Michael had a look that he got sometimes, the look of a man who understood something too well and would far rather be baffled.

“For some women, their children are never really separate people. This woman didn’t think of it as murder.

” He waved his hand toward the door to the autopsy room, with its small, sad occupant.

“Because she thought she owned him,” I said bitterly, but Michael was already shaking his head.

“Sometimes, certainly, but not in this case. I spoke with her, you know. She’s a sad creature, and she’s genuinely confused that this is being treated as murder. In her mind, she was hurting herself , not anyone else. If anything, she thought of this as a sort of suicide.”

Saints, but I wish you were here , I told Michael inside my head. You could tell me why things are happening, and maybe then I could figure out how they’re happening.

For that matter, why had Nurse even told me any of this?

I tried to pretend I was Michael and understood people. She’d told me because she derived something from telling me. All I’d done was say, awkwardly, “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t possibly have known.” But she’d seemed satisfied with that, so…

Absolution, I thought. She is looking for absolution that she didn’t cause the tragedy.

Well and good. But there was another tragedy unfolding in slow motion, and that was the one I was here to solve.

Did the dead queen have anything to do with Snow’s condition?

It seemed unlikely, given that she was, y’know, dead .

But a woman who stabbed one daughter might not balk at poisoning another one, if she saw them both as an extension of herself, and it was possible that she’d given Snow something, some object, that would slowly kill the girl over months.

Possible even that she’d given it to her long before killing Rose.

Or possibly it didn’t have anything to do with the dead queen at all, and I was grasping at straws because I couldn’t find a damn thing otherwise.

The rooster had completed his circuit of my workroom, made a deposit on the floor, and was now hunkered down in a sunbeam from the window. The light picked out iridescent greens from his otherwise-mangy tail feathers.

“I’m putting this off,” I told him, “because I don’t want to go through Snow’s things. But I guess I don’t have a choice, do I?”

Maybe it was because the king was still in residence.

Maybe it was the fact that I apologized profusely or that I was so obviously trying to be respectful of her privacy.

Regardless, Snow did not argue. I had expected a scene on par with the way she’d insulted the maids, but instead she sat down in the corner and watched.

She had a faint, superior smile on her face.

You won’t find anything, that smile said.

You’re being paranoid and reading too much into a twelve-year-old’s smile , I told myself.

With the help of the maids, I went systematically through rows and rows of dresses, checking pockets and trimmings, even taking small swatches of fabric, because there are some dyes that use arsenic for coloring.

I checked every jewelry box, every necklace and earring, every lotion and powder.

I even carefully snipped a page corner from three different dog-eared books, because everyone’s heard the story about pages that poison you when you lick your finger to turn them.

(I can’t swear it wouldn’t work, but I’ve never heard of it actually happening.)