Page 9 of Hemlock & Silver

“The heart is the organ sacred to Saint Adder,” I said, sounding pompous in my own ears. “His children’s bite therefore works strongly upon it. The venom is of the sanguine humor, and that is the humor being overwhelmed by the lotus, which is of the phlegmatic humor, so we must strengthen it.”

“But won’t the venom kill him?”

I sighed and glanced at the door to make certain it was closed. “He’s probably already dead. Lotus smoke is a combination of opium and white thorn apple. Both of those relax the muscles. If you’re not careful, they relax your heart until it stops beating.”

Aaron digested this. “I see. So the venom keeps the heart beating?”

I curled my fingers around the patient’s wrist, trying to find his pulse. “Sometimes. If I get there soon enough. If they’re very lucky. If the saints are feeling generous.”

“And the nose…?”

People always make a big deal about that.

I don’t know why, since you have to get medicine into the body somehow, and it’s not like the other options are that much better.

“The most efficient way to administer the venom,” I said.

“At least to do it quickly. The stomach breaks it down, and we didn’t have time for an enema.

” Was that a heartbeat against my fingers?

I shifted my grip, feeling for something that might not be there, then gave up and pressed my ear against the man’s chest.

Yes… there… a heartbeat. Then much too long a pause, and then another one.

Oh, I knew better than to hope, I knew that this was almost certainly just the final rallying before the end, but I could fool myself that the beat was a little stronger, that maybe this time…

Aaron knelt next to me, not asking any more questions.

I was surprised that he’d spoken at all.

I’d thought all guards were supposed to be the strong, silent type.

Maybe pushing me out of the way of the horse had opened the floodgates.

Probably, it was seeing me blow something up someone’s nose, though.

Ironically, now that I would have welcomed conversation, he’d fallen silent.

There was a statue of Saint Adder in a niche in the wall.

It was carved out of wood by an artisan with more enthusiasm than skill.

The tail bells were blobs, and the head was too small.

I prayed anyway, a little, but mostly I just waited for the inevitable.

It didn’t take long. The man’s pulse quickened as the venom took effect, faster but still thready, still much too weak, a thin little mouse of a sound, tapping inside his chest—and then, between one beat and the next, it stopped.

I waited, not quite hoping, but the mouse had fled and left only silence.

When I lifted my head from his chest, I saw that it no longer rose and fell at all.

We sat beside the body a little while longer. I had to be sure. It’s so hard to tell when someone is dead, not just deeply asleep. I took the mirror out of my medical bag and held it in front of his lips. The surface stayed unclouded.

“Right,” I said, sighing deeply, and began repacking my bag.

“I’m sorry,” Aaron said quietly.

“So am I.”

My guard offered the next statement cautiously, as if it—or I—were made of porcelain. “He was a criminal.”

“He was,” I said, my voice coming out clipped. This was an argument I’d had too many times with too many people. One that I still had sometimes, in my head. “But smoking lotus isn’t a capital crime. The people who run the dens are the criminals, and they never end up here.”

I don’t know if Aaron reacted to my words or to the tone of my voice. I can’t imagine it was kind. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Even though he’d apologized, it was hard to shed the anger. I would have liked to ignore the hand he held out to me, but it wasn’t as easy to get to my feet as it used to be. I let him help me up, and we both stood looking down at the dead man.

My anger faded. Death has a way of clarifying these things.

I turned away and blotted at my eyes with my sleeve.

I wasn’t grieving, exactly—I hadn’t known the man, and I won’t pretend that I’m the sort of kind soul who cries for every stranger—but I had listened to his last heartbeats, and they’d left some fragile, nameless emotion in their wake.

I took a deep breath and let it out. “I knew it was too late,” I said, to Aaron or the statue or the body on the pallet. “But I had to try.”

He gripped my shoulder for a moment, the way people do when they want to offer comfort but don’t know how.

I opened the door. Healer Michael looked up as I stepped out, and I met his eyes and shook my head.

Jonas was sitting on a little bench against the wall.

He looked up at me, and I said, “I’m sorry,” which I would have said to an adult.

Probably it was the wrong thing to say to a child, but damned if I knew what I was supposed to say.

People had said all sorts of things to me when my mother died, and half of them had been insulting and the other half simply inane.

And I had been younger than Jonas and far more sheltered at that.

I’d bite my own tongue off before telling a street kid like Jonas that his brother was with the angels now.

He nodded once and looked away. I took myself and my guard away, leaving Healer Michael to deal with the aftermath of my failure.

Listening to all this, you may think that my work is all dead bodies. Dead cousins, dead addicts, dead dead dead.

It isn’t, though. The vast majority of the people I see live.

I don’t descend like one of Saint Vulture’s children and hang around while they expire.

Most of the time, it’s a child who’s gotten into something they shouldn’t, and I can fix it with either charcoal or vomiting.

The hardest part is the loved ones trying to thank me.

If I were a good person, I’d take it in the spirit that it was intended, but me being me, it’s just excruciating.

I want to yell, It’s just charcoal! I’m not superhuman!

You don’t have to swear that you’ll do anything I ask, anything at all, for all eternity!

(I don’t say this, obviously. Healer Michael had explained it to me once, and his explanation made as much sense as anything.

“Fear is like a balloon,” he said, “and it blows up bigger and bigger. When it finally pops, relief comes rushing in to fill the space. The larger the fear, the larger the relief afterward. Then they have to find a way to let off that relief, and one of those ways is by dumping it all over the healer.” Which is fine, and I’ve gotten better at smiling and nodding and even having people weep all over me. Still don’t enjoy it, though.)

Adults tend to have more complicated problems. Some of them I can fix, some I can’t—things like long-term lead poisoning are beyond the skill of any physician—but they still don’t usually die .

The human body is a strange combination of incredibly fragile and unspeakably tough.

I’ve seen patients dosed with enough arsenic to kill any three normal people, patients with so much lead in their systems that there are blue lines in their gums, patients who’ve downed so many peach pits that prussic acid ought to be leaking out of their pores.

Half the time they get up and walk out under their own power.

Hell, I’ve even managed to save three lotus addicts with my cobbled-together venom treatments.

(The corollary to this is that there are probably people who drop dead of such minuscule doses of poison that they never even make it to see me, and their deaths get written off as a heart attack or a thunderclap coronary. Which is terrible, of course, but there’s not much I can do about it.)

Regardless, my point is that most of my patients leave on their feet and not feetfirst. And patients aren’t even the majority of my work, come to that.

I actually spend far more time at home, puttering around my workroom and distilling things into other things.

The temple sends me the occasional jar of stomach contents to poke through and test for common poisons, and I have my own research to pursue, trying to find better treatments than charcoal and vomiting.

It’s not the most exciting life, but it was mine and I enjoyed it. Until the king turned up in my workroom and turned everything upside down.