Page 5 of Hemlock & Silver

I groaned and flung my legs over the arm of the chair, sliding down until my head rested on the opposite arm.

I stared up at the ceiling with its peeled-log supports, as if the answers to my questions were written in the lightly polished wood.

“Hemlock is green,” I said, “and the opposite of green is red. And the root is poisonous, and the opposite of roots is probably flowers? Except that the root is sort of whitish, so the opposite might be black, and the whole thing is a vegetable, so the opposite is an animal, unless it’s a mineral.

It has the cold, watery aspect of the phlegmatic humor and thus is associated with Saint Trout.

So I’m looking for a red or black flower…

or mineral or animal… with a hot, dry aspect, of the choleric humor, which would be associated with Saint Lizard or Saint Adder.

But that means it could be anything from torch flower to charcoal to…

I don’t know, a reptile of some sort. There are red-and-black lizards, aren’t there? ”

“There are,” Scand agreed.

“An infusion of torch flower is good for sore eyes,” I said, “but once you’ve eaten hemlock, I don’t think you’re worried about your eyes. Charcoal is good for some poisons, but not this one.” I stared broodingly at the ceiling. “I don’t know about the lizard.”

“As I recall, the passage you found also said ‘mirror image,’ did it not?”

“I thought of that, too,” I said. “But if I hold up a mirror to a hemlock root, it doesn’t matter if the reflection would be an antidote, because I don’t have any way of getting it out of the mirror.” Scand was silent for so long that I sat up. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I thought once… but that was a long time ago.” He hastily moved to distract me, which wasn’t terribly hard. “Perhaps we’re going about this the wrong way. Maybe an antidote isn’t an opposite.”

“But the book said it was.”

“Who wrote the book?”

“It was translated from Harkelion the Physician.”

Scand leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “What if he was wrong?”

I stared at him in alarm. “What? But he’s—he was one of the classical scholars! You know? He wrote half the books on medicine!”

“That doesn’t mean he was right, ” Scand said.

“But physicians still use his books!” I tapped the cover of a book next to me. “They quote him all the time.” Practically every book I’d read had at least an epigraph attributed to Harkelion, and most of them had much more.

“I’m sure they do,” said Scand. “But that doesn’t mean he was right. It just means that everyone has learned to repeat his errors.”

I felt as if he had kicked one of the legs out from under my chair and set everything wobbling. “But he lived in ancient times! They were more enlightened—they knew things that we forgot—”

“In some ways, yes,” he said. “But just because someone lived a thousand years ago doesn’t make them correct.”

I put my head in my hands. “But everybody says they were so wise .”

“Some of them were,” Scand said gently. “And there’s a reason we go back to so many of their manuscripts. But they were still just people, like you and me. If someone found your notes in a thousand years, would that make you right?”

I glared at him through my spread fingers. “But you’re the one who taught us the classics! You made me read that entire essay on geometry!”

Scand laughed, which did nothing to mollify me.

“And if you had any interest in geometry, it would have been a very useful foundation, too. But it doesn’t mean that all the classical scholars were right about everything they wrote.

Some of them were very egregiously wrong, in fact.

I think it was Marthian who advised cutting open a pigeon and placing it on the forehead of someone who was feverish in order to draw out the sickness. ”

“Eww.” I thought of my last fever and how sweaty and miserable I’d felt, then tried to imagine how much worse everything would have been if there was a vivisected pigeon on my forehead.

“Exactly. We discard the writings that don’t work for us and keep the ones that do.” Scand shook his head ruefully. “One of my teachers had this exact conversation with me when I was studying. But I was nineteen at the time, so you’re doing better than I am.”

This was not much consolation. “But if Harkelion was wrong, then we’re back where we started,” I said, waving to the books that I had gone through with such care and the piles of notes in my crabbed handwriting.

I had gotten painful hand cramps writing all those notes, and I’d cut myself twice sharpening quills. “And all this will have been wasted .”

“Not at all. You’ve learned a great deal.

You know the precise effects of hemlock on the body.

You know a dozen common antidotes and why none of them work on hemlock, but why they may work on other poisons.

And you’ve read the Materia Botanica twice.

You probably know more about poisoning than most physicians.

You don’t have to redo any of that.” One corner of his mouth twisted up in a smile.

“That’s the thing about learning. You get to keep it. ”

“I would rather have the answer,” I muttered.

“Maybe you’ll find the answer to a different question. If you never find the antidote for hemlock, but you do find one for… oh… colchicum, say… would you still consider your time wasted?”

I considered that for a few minutes. Colchicum is our autumn crocus, which is beautiful and grows in many gardens.

Every now and again, someone takes it in their head to eat some.

It can take up to a week to die, and it’s not nearly as painless as poison hemlock.

“That would be pretty useful,” I admitted grudgingly.

“But I’d rather find an antidote for both.

And anyway ”—I thumped the book again—“if Harkelion was wrong, then I don’t know how to go about finding either one.

” According to the herbwife, I would probably need to poison either dogs or prisoners, and I had moral objections on both counts.

(Also, I was twelve and unlikely to be given access to the palace prisons for scientific purposes.)

Scand reached out and tugged the offending book toward his side of the desk. “Even if he was right, this is a translation. Trans lation isn’t always precise. It may be that someone used the wrong word and set us off on the wrong track.”

I scowled. “So what do we do about that ?”

“Well,” said Scand, “you could learn a dead language…”

I let out a wail of despair.

“… or I could translate it for you, if we can find something closer to the original.”

I stared at the book. Then I stared at the ceiling. A little voice whispered to me that I could just give up now. I’d taken this as far as I could go, and I had learned a lot. As Scand said, I got to keep that. I could admit defeat and put the books away.

Surely if there was an answer, someone would have found it by now.

Harkelion had lived a thousand years ago.

You could still see the ruins of the city he’d lived in, all weathered stone and tumbledown walls.

If he’d just been translated wrong, someone would have figured that out in the centuries it had taken for those walls to come down.

It was ridiculous to think that a twelve-year-old girl might find an answer that a thousand years of physicians had overlooked.

There was a hot, headachy feeling behind my eyes, like suppressed tears.

“I’ll never find it, will I?” I said out loud. “This is pointless.”

“ No, ” said Scand, and I stopped looking at the ceiling and looked at him instead, because he didn’t sound the way he normally did, all calm and measured.

He sounded raw and angry, the way that I felt.

“Anja, you may or may not find the cure for poison hemlock, but I promise you, if you keep studying, you will find something . Something that will make all the work you’ve done worthwhile. ”

“I’m twelve,” I said, in a very small voice.

“Then you’ve gotten started early.” He reached out and squeezed my hand, which came as a surprise.

Scand never touched anyone, so far as I could tell.

His fingers were dry and warm, and his grip was tight, as if I’d slid over the edge of a cliff and he needed to haul me back up.

“If you keep asking questions, you will find answers. I promise you.”

It took me more than twenty years, but in the end, I proved him right.