Page 6 of Hemlock & Silver

“ Of course you’ve heard the rumors about his wife’s death,” my sister Isobel said, clearly exasperated. “I told you about them.”

“What? No.” I was packing straw around my distilling equipment, but paused and straightened up. My lower back did not appreciate the angle I’d been leaning at, and made its displeasure known. I rubbed it, which didn’t really help. “You did?”

“Yes,” Isobel said. “I did. I was standing here and you were standing over there”—she gestured in the general direction of the worktable—“and you said, ‘Oh, hmm, interesting.’ And I asked if you thought it was true, and you said that you hadn’t any idea, and then something caught fire.”

“Oh, that day,” I said, relieved. “Yes, I remember that. And it was only a small fire.”

“But you forgot about the king’s wife.”

“… It wasn’t that small a fire.”

Isobel rolled her eyes. Both of us take after our father, dark-haired and dark-eyed, but Isobel was scaled down in every dimension, neither absurdly tall nor excessively wide.

I, on the other hand, am a female copy of him: broad shoulders, barrel curve of a stomach, thighs like pillars, heavy muscle generously smoothed with fat.

Being tall has its advantages, especially in reaching high shelves, but I still often felt like a water ox next to my sister.

“Still, the king! Think of it!” She spread her arms wide. “Perhaps if you cure his daughter, he will fall madly in love with you and marry you and make you the queen!”

“Given the fate of the last two queens, I’m not certain I’d want that.”

“Oh, poo. You can’t count Queen Maevis—she died of purpureal fever.”

“I’d rather not die of that either, thank you very much.

” I shut the lid on the trunk and tightened the straps to hold it closed.

I had very little hope of my distilling equipment arriving in the same number of pieces that it left, but I was going to do my damnedest anyway.

Perhaps the king had access to wagons that didn’t rattle like the bones of the dead.

Isobel sat up straighter, clearly struck by a sudden thought. “Wait, what are you going to wear?”

“I had planned on wearing clothes, but I am open to suggestions.”

My sister groaned. “No, no. You don’t have any clothes. Not any that you can wear in public.”

“He’s already seen me in my worst gown. I don’t think he cares.”

“ He probably doesn’t, but everyone else will.”

I sighed. “I have a perfectly respectable wardrobe. I go out in public in it all the time.”

“Yes, but you look like a nun.”

“Isobel, I’m going to try to cure the king’s daughter. If I succeed, no one will care what I’m wearing.”

Her expression was unexpectedly grave. “You know that half the nobles won’t care if you succeed or not, if you’re wearing the wrong thing when you do it.”

“That’s not true,” I said, more because I didn’t want it to be true than because she was wrong. I slammed another trunk shut. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what they think. The king’s the one who matters.”

“The nobles are the ones most likely to buy Father’s stock,” Isobel said. Which was also true, so far as it went. And if I fail, we will lose buyers. Possibly a lot of buyers. And backers on future projects will pull out, and without backers, there will be nothing for anyone to buy anyway.

Nor would my sisters escape unscathed. Isobel was married to a man who had invested heavily in his father-in-law’s business, and while Catherine’s husband was in the military, who could say what promotions might go to other, less worthy men, if his family was in disgrace?

I braced my arms on the lid of the trunk and stared at it, though I didn’t see it. I was seeing my sisters and their families and my nieces and nephews and my father, who was no longer young.

And behind them, faceless, the others. The ones I didn’t know yet. The ones that I could sometimes save, but not if I was three days away.

“I’m sorry,” I said. The edges of the rattan trunk bit into my fingers, stamping wave patterns into my skin. “I never meant for this to happen.”

In the silence that followed, I heard the rustle of Isobel’s skirts as she rose. Then my sister’s arms went around me, and she said, “Dear heart. No one could have predicted this. Not even you.”

I made a little choked sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. I couldn’t tell and was afraid to find out. “No,” I said, straightening up. “No, I don’t think anyone could have.”

“Besides,” Isobel said, “I feel sorry for the girl, don’t you? Losing her sister and her mother like that, and being poisoned as well.”

“Assuming it’s poison at all.” I sighed. Of course, I felt a pang of sympathy for the girl. I wasn’t a monster. But a king’s daughter has a whole kingdom to rely on, and some of the people I’m trying to help can’t even rely on themselves… “I don’t even know how long I’ll be gone,” I said.

“As long as it takes,” said Isobel. “Perhaps you’ll walk in, recognize it immediately, and be back home within the week.”

“Your faith in me is touching. More likely I’ll be stuck there for months. And what do I tell the king if I can’t figure it out? ‘I’m sorry, I’m stumped, can I please go home now?’”

“You always say that it’s probably not poison. Just tell him that.” Isobel had been subjected to a great many of my lectures about how rarely people are actually deliberately poisoned, and I was gratified to see that apparently she’d listened to at least one of them.

“I tried,” I said. “But royalty is… different.”

That was something of an understatement.

Up until the time I was six years old, our king had been a man called Bastian the Demon.

It was not a title given out of affection.

He had been powerful, violent, and paranoid, convinced that his courtiers were part of a grand conspiracy to poison him.

No one, from the lowliest servant to the highest noble, was safe.

Those around him said that Bastian would be calm, even charming, for days at a time, then would suddenly shift, almost in midsentence, and lash out.

The king’s guard would appear on people’s doorsteps in the night and take them away for their role in imagined conspiracies.

Rumor had it that he’d once stabbed his own poison taster in the middle of a royal feast, rolled the man’s body onto the table, and proceeded to eat the rest of the courses off the dead man’s back.

( But Anja, you ask me, why didn’t the nobles just overthrow the Demon?

Good question. My guess is that no one wanted to be the first one to step up, because if no one stepped up behind you, you were dead.

Monarchy, as the ancient philosopher Margay the Younger wrote, is a terrible form of government, but at least there’s always someone around to blame.)

The king—our current king, the one who appeared in my workroom two days ago—was the Demon’s nephew. He had been kept at the palace as something between an heir and a hostage, since the Demon could never quite decide if his nephew was in danger from the conspiracy or a leading figure in it.

Before he came to a final judgment on the matter, Bastian died, much to the relief of everyone in the kingdom, with the possible exception of his mistress.

Ironically, the autopsy showed that he had been poisoned, which led to questions that no one really wanted answered.

The Demon was buried quickly, his nephew took the throne, people stopped disappearing, and that was that.

So now here we were, thirty years later, with the king’s daugh ter maybe going the same way as her uncle. At least, I couldn’t rule it out.

“I’ll do my best. You know I will. But if the physicians couldn’t figure it out, how will I?

And in the meantime, how many people here that I could help will…

” I trailed off. If I didn’t say the word die out loud, maybe it wouldn’t happen.

Which was completely irrational, of course, and unworthy of a scholar, but I still didn’t say the word out loud.

“Is there someone else they can go to?” Isobel asked.

I grunted. After a minute I said, somewhat grudgingly, “Healer Michael can handle most things, I suppose.” This was ungracious even for me.

Michael lacked my encyclopedic knowledge of poison, but he was the better healer in every way that counted.

“Except for the lotus-smoke cases. No one else does those.”

No one else even tries. Everyone knows it’s hopeless, except me.

Isobel knew better than to say anything. I squeezed her hand instead. We sat together in the emptied workroom, the sun shining on bare wood and tile instead of glass. In her cage, the chime-adder shifted with a jingle of miniature bells.

“Enough grim thoughts,” Isobel said finally, standing up. “Let’s go out. I know a dressmaker who can work miracles in a day and a half.”

“Well, since it apparently takes twice that for the king’s retinue to actually go anywhere…

” I stepped away from my glassware. “I’m still going to dress like a nun.

It’s safer than sending me out in gowns that will catch fire or fall down when I least expect it.

” It was also safer, as a spinster-scholar, to look like a nun.

People did not bother nuns, and sometimes they even listened to them.

“Fiiiiine,” said Isobel, drawing the word out in mock despair. “At least you can look like a nun with good taste.” She threaded her arm through mine. “And we’ll take one of those guards with us to carry the packages.”

The guards were named Aaron and Javier. Aaron was short and tanned, with curly black hair and a ready smile. Javier was tall and rawboned, with an impressively hawk-like nose and skin the color of walnut wood.