Page 34 of Hemlock & Silver

I sighed. I’d been so close to reassuring myself, too.

Why would she keep eating the apples? She must have known that they were making her sick. I could have seen it if it was just an emetic—some people, as Nurse had said, had an illness like that—but surely she’d use something that didn’t make you feel as if you were going to puke up your toenails.

Was she deliberately poisoning herself?

It seemed utterly absurd, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

People do absurd, irrational things all the time.

Hell, Healer Michael had once told me of a case where a woman came in who was clearly in the early stages of hydrophobia, but hadn’t been bitten by a dog or a skunk or any of the usual suspects.

“And it eventually came out that she had attempted to breastfeed a bat,” he said heavily.

“Because it was injured and she worried it was hungry.”

I’d snorted in horrified amusement. You don’t want to laugh at someone who’s died such an awful death, but for the love of the saints, what was she thinking ?

“The point,” Michael had said dryly, “is that if you think, ‘Surely no one would do that!’—well, someone will , and probably they’ll be expecting you to fix it.”

Snow was so hedged around with guards and servants, though. How was she even getting the apples? It seemed impossible.

But then I remembered that smile I’d caught that very first day, the sly, secret smile in the mirror, and I wondered…

And then another, much more immediate thought struck me, and I sat bolt upright.

Chickens can’t vomit.

“Oh shit,” I muttered, and crawled in the direction of the bellpull.

Aaron and Javier entered my room five minutes later and discovered me crouched on the floor, greenish and shivering, with my hair hanging in damp strands over my face. I had achieved a tentative truce with my innards, but I wasn’t sure how long they would keep their end of the bargain.

Aaron’s eyes went wide. “Mistress Anja?”

Javier, somewhat more practically, pulled a dressing gown off a hook and wrapped it around me over my nap-rumpled clothes. He sniffed while he did it, clearly trying to see if I was reeking of alcohol, and apparently decided that I wasn’t.

I had a wild urge to ask for a hug. It wasn’t just the cold.

There’s something about having been really ill that leaves you feeling wrung out and vulnerable, and I simultaneously wanted to crawl into my bed and never see another human again and to have someone pat me on my shoulder and say, There, there .

Sadly, I was pretty sure that you weren’t supposed to ask your bodyguards to do that.

“Should we get a healer?” Aaron asked.

I wasn’t going to waste words through my bile-ravaged throat to point out that I was a healer. “Need to go to my workshop,” I rasped instead. “Poison.”

Both men went still. Aaron’s sympathetic smile vanished. Javier, who spoke so rarely, said, in a voice that was flat and much too calm, “Tell us his name, mistress, and he will die.”

That was a strange feeling. I’d never had anyone offer to kill someone for me before. I didn’t doubt him at all. Explaining about the apple would take much too long. I shook my head. “Don’t know.”

My guards swung into action as smoothly as if they escorted retching charges all the time.

(Actually, if they had ever been set to guard a drunkard, they probably did have some experience with it.) Javier got my arm over his shoulders and got me to my feet.

Aaron grabbed the empty pitcher from the washroom in case I needed to be sick again, and the two of them led me out into the hallway and in the direction of my workroom.

Aaron had the lamp from my nightstand and pushed doors open.

I had wanted a hug, but being half carried by Javier was not the same thing.

I clutched the pitcher for dear life and hoped I wouldn’t need it.

(The mouth of the pitcher was very narrow, and I did not trust my stomach’s aim.)

Somehow, we got to the workroom. Aaron hastily lit the lamps.

I imagine they expected me to immediately begin preparing an antidote to the poison.

Instead, I fell to my knees in front of the rooster’s cage.

He was a dark, immobile lump in the back of it.

I swung the door open and yanked the dish of corn out, cursing.

Had I sentenced him to a horrible death?

(Yes, I know, the whole point of the rooster was to test for poisons. I told you I hated doing it, though, and since I already knew the apple was toxic, the rooster’s death wasn’t necessary. Also, I wouldn’t sentence my worst enemy to death by nausea.)

I poked the rooster. “Come on,” I muttered. Had he eaten any of the corn? Or had he just gone straight to sleep? “Come on…”

“Rrrr-rrr-rrr,” the rooster said, the sound of a disgruntled chicken being woken up against his will.

“Um, Mistress Anja?” Aaron said, the sound of a baffled bodyguard watching his charge determinedly poking a chicken.

The rooster’s eyes were round, not half-lidded, and his comb was bright. He mostly seemed annoyed. It looked like he hadn’t eaten any corn before going to sleep. Chickens pass things quicker than we do. If I gave him a day with only water, maybe the apple would go out of his system.

I got slowly to my feet and put my forearms on the table, leaning heavily against it. Aaron and Javier were both looking at me with the kind of studied impassivity that people get when they think you’re about to start raving about whippoorwills stealing your toenails.

“Can you tell us what exactly happened?” Aaron asked, very carefully.

It had occurred to me that the two of them could be very useful in tracking down the source of the apple, regardless of whether it was from the mirror or not. Someone had to be giving it to Snow, right?

Or else she’s walking into the mirror and getting it herself.

In which case, maybe they’d see that happen and… well… I’d deal with that if and when it came up.

But why would there be apples in the mirror? There are no apple groves here to reflect. The nearest orchards are back in Four Saints. Though I suppose there might be a barrel down in the cellars…

It occurred to me that Aaron and Javier had been staring at me for a rather long time and that I should probably say something. I shoved all thoughts of mirrors down and hoped they’d put the pause down to my illness. “Right,” I said. “I’m afraid this was self-inflicted…”

I recounted the whole saga, minus the mirrors. At one point Javier fetched me a cup of water from the jug I kept to water the snake and the chicken. Other than that, they just listened.

“And… uh… that’s where we’re at,” I finished, somewhat anticlimactically.

Aaron said, with marvelous patience, “Are you telling me that you poisoned yourself, then rushed down here in order to save a pet chicken?”

“He’s not a pet. He’s more of a colleague.”

“That’s what you said about the snake.”

“And I’d rush down here to save her, too.” I pulled the dressing gown tighter around myself. “Look, the important thing is that someone is sneaking poisoned apples to Snow.”

“Not quite,” Javier said, in his deep, solemn voice.

“The important thing is that someone is sneaking poisoned apples to Snow and she is eating them . Willingly.” He looked from my face to Aaron’s.

“Whoever is doing this, they have clearly convinced her that it is in her own best interests to eat poison.”

I nodded glumly. “I can’t think that she hasn’t connected the apple to the illness. She’s not that young.”

“Could someone have convinced her that the apple is curing her?” Aaron asked.

“Maybe? I don’t know. Or it could be like people eating arsenic, and she thinks it’s building an immunity to something?” I spread my hands helplessly.

“There must be some reason,” Aaron said.

“Even if there is, I can’t just ask her, since I’m definitely not in her good graces right now. Which reminds me, I have to finish my letter to the king, and Saints know what I’m going to say…”

“I can assist you with that,” Javier said unexpectedly. “Tomorrow.” He no longer had the whippoorwill-and-toenails look, but he seemed to have moved to you cannot be trusted to care for yourself, which, under the circumstances, I couldn’t argue with.

“We’ll help you,” Aaron said. “There are only so many times of the day when someone is not watching Snow. We can ask around and watch ourselves.”

I nodded. “That would be a huge help.” I started to say more and caught myself in a jaw-cracking yawn. The exhaustion of the day, both physical and emotional, seemed to crash over me all at once. “And… I think I should go lie down.”

My guards helped me back up to my room. I halfway wondered if they were going to tuck me into bed, too, but they stopped at the doorway. “Send a page when you require my help with the letter,” Javier said. I promised that I would.

I crossed the room, fell down on the bed, and was instantly asleep. Sometime in the night, I woke up long enough to take off my shoes, but that was all.