Page 14 of Hemlock & Silver
It isn’t, though. The vast majority of the people I see live. I don’tdescend 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 usuallydie. 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.
CHAPTER 5
Three days passed before the king was ready to leave. I had been a bit surprised to learn that when the king saidcome with me,he didn’t mean within the hour, but Javier assured me that this was actually extremely fast as such things went.
Apparently a king could not go anywhere, even one of his own estates, in less than three days. Immense numbers of people had to ride ahead to every stop, to deliver food and bedding and other necessities, presumably so that the immense number of people had something to eat when they got there. And there were servants and guards and horses and grooms, and also a strangely large number of people who were going simply because the king was going and who seemed to fulfill no function whatsoever.
I’d had everything packed by the end of the first day and began to fret myself into near madness. I consulted every book in my library about poisons, running over the signs and symptoms—loose teeth, blue lines on the gums, garlic-scented breath, vomiting, vomiting, vomiting. When the human body is poisoned, vomiting is almost always the first line of defense. (This is another reason that I usually wear brown.) I knew all these things, and I knew that I knew, but I had a horrible fear that when I finally confronted Snow, I would panic and forget everything that I had ever learned.
Eventually I decided to go for a walk. Javier fell into step behind me. They switched off on who was the going-out guard and who was the staying-at-home guard. I wondered which job they preferred.
I meandered aimlessly around the streets, trying to think of something useful to do. There was nothing left to prepare. I had packed everything I could imagine needing, and a few things thatI couldn’t. Lacking the princess’s symptoms yet, I could not consult with another scholar in my field. I had written a note for my father and had dinner with Isobel and made all the arrangements with the housekeeper that you make when you are going out of town for an unspecified length of time.
At last I turned a corner, and there was the Temple of Saint Adder again. Scand used to say that prayer was what you did when you had done everything else you could possibly do. Apparently I was at that point now. I turned my steps toward the temple, listening to the echo of Javier’s booted feet behind my own.
The great statue in the center of the sanctuary portrayed Him as a rearing chime-adder with his tail carved into dozens of bells. The sculptor had somehow made the serpent’s eyes look both wise and kind. It was an impressive feat. I have seen a chime-adder rear that way on occasion, and never when the snake was feeling benevolent.
I made my way along one wing of the sanctuary, running my hand along the metal bells set into the wall. Dozens of bells ran the length of each wall, set at waist height, so that anyone walking past could send up a chorus in their wake. Other pilgrims were doing the same, so the bells formed a liquid backdrop to the sound of prayer.
My destination was not the main sanctuary but a small shrine, set down a flight of stairs and behind an unmarked door, as if the temple were slightly embarrassed by it.Saint Adder may be the patron of poisons, but we prefer not to dwell on the matter.
I started to kneel to crawl into the tiny entryway, but Javier stepped in front of me, ducked down, and looked inside. I rolled my eyes behind his back. Did he really think that someone was going to be hiding in there, ready to collude with me? Lurking behind the candles, perhaps?
Finding no suspicious characters, he nodded and stepped back, gesturing that I could enter.
The sound of bells faded behind me as I crawled inside. I heardthe scuff of boots on stone as Javier took up a place beside the entrance.
The shrine of Saint Adder the Poisoner was old, older by far than the rest of the building, but they had not removed it when they built the great sanctuary overhead. It still had the original walls, made of dry stone laid without mortar, though surrounded on the outside by sandstone brick. On the wall opposite the door was an ancient painting in red ochre, a headless man with the coils of an adder set above his shoulders. The paint had worn over the centuries, and smoke had stained the ceiling, but the adder’s tail bells were still clearly visible.
I took a deep breath and let it out, trying to organize my thoughts.
I’m not actually good at praying. Not when I have time to think about it, anyway. In the moment, of course, when there’s someone in front of me who’s accidentally eaten rat poison, I pray as much as anyone. But formal prayer, something beyondoh Saints, let this work,is another matter.
The problem is ramifications. If I convinced a saint to save a life, what might happen? I don’t mean the stupid questions, like,What if they go on to kill thousands of people?,because in real life, that almost never happens. The number of people who go on to start wars or spread plagues is vanishingly small. But take my cousin Anthony, for example. I’m sure his mother prayed for him to survive. But if he had, I wouldn’t have become obsessed with poisons.
There were sixteen lives that I was absolutely positive I had saved. Maybe more, but never mind—I wassureabout those sixteen. Would all those people have died if my cousin had lived? I don’t know. Maybe they would have, or maybe the temple would have realized they needed a poison specialist and trained someone, and maybe some of them would have lived. Maybe this hypothetical specialist would be better at their job than I am and more people would have been saved. How can you know?
And even if you could know, what gives you the right to say thatAnthony’s life was worth trading away? One for sixteen sounds like a bargain, sure, but turn it the other way, and you’re saying that a child should’ve died simply because it wasinspirational. I’m pretty sure that’s monstrous.
Maybe the point of gods and saints is that they can make the monstrous choices that people can’t. Or maybe Anthony’s life was always going to end when it intersected with that little root that smelled of mouse nests, and the best the saints could do was to bend his cousin’s mind to an obsession that would someday save others, and pry some good out of tragedy. All I know is that when I think about these things, I wind up afraid to pray for anything too specific, as if I’d be joggling the elbow of someone who is trying to run the universe.
My sister says that I think too much. Scand said that I had too much of the melancholic humor of earth and needed to eat more red meat.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to help this girl,” I told the saint finally, as I sat there with my knees aching from the rough stone floor. “Just… please send me wherever I can do the most good. That’s all.”
I leaned forward and rang the handbell that stood in front of the painting, then sat while the echoes rang around me. When the last one had died, I felt… not better, exactly. Emptier, the way that you feel after a good cry. A little more peaceful. Some of the bitterness at having to leave my work in the city had faded with the echoes. Wherever I was going, if the saints were kind, maybe I could do some good.
