Page 22 of Hemlock & Silver
If white thorn apple just did that, I’d have no complaint with it. If you go around eating random plants without knowing what they are, then yes, sooner or later you’re going to wind up either very unhappy or very dead. Plants aren’t necessarily your friends.
“You’re scowling very fiercely,” said the king, startling me out of my thoughts. “Not at me, I hope.”
“I… no, Your Majesty. Of course not.” I tried to turn the scowl into a smile, which probably ended up looking ghastly. “I would never scowl at a king.”
“Not where he might see you, anyway,” the king said dryly. “So what were you scowling at?”
The truth was easiest. I turned and pointed. “That plant there.”
“Unlucky plant. What exactly did it do?”
I explained about common thorn apple and the delirium and screaming and lack of urination, while his eyebrows went up. On my other side, Javier made a tiny sound that might have been amusement.
“Saints preserve us,” the king said. “What a monster.”
“Right,” I said. “But this iswhitethorn apple. You hallucinate a bit, and then it puts you to sleep.”
“That… doesn’t sound as bad?”
“Not inherently.” I could feel the scowl creeping up again.
The king was right, so far as that went. People had used concoctions that included very small amounts of white thorn apple to assist with surgeries for centuries. Having, for example, your leg amputated tends to burn through the sleepiness remarkably quickly, although I’m sure the hallucinations in that case aren’t much fun either.
The problem, as I tried to explain, started when we began gettingopium imported from across the southern sea, and while opium is a godsend when dealing with things like leg amputations, some bastard eventually realized that you could mix opium with white thorn apple seeds, and you’d be happy and weightless and watching pretty pictures in the smoke. Unless, of course, you relaxed too much and your heart stopped, and then, if you were very lucky and I wasn’t three days away, Imightbe able to yank you back to the land of the living.
The king sighed. “Lotus dens are one of those intractable problems that we face. For some reason, the guard seems ill-equipped to stop them.”
Aaron cleared his throat. “Majesty? If I may?”
“You were a city guard once, weren’t you?” The king gestured to him. “Speak, by all means.”
“They are hard to find, Your Majesty. Compared to drunks, lotus smokers do hardly any property damage, and the dens are much quieter neighbors, but owned by dangerous people. People find it easier to look the other way, if they notice at all. So they can operate on the edges of much better neighborhoods. The guard only hears of them if smokers turn to theft to support their habit.”
“One would think that a clever owner would hire guards to prevent that,” said the king thoughtfully.
“Some do, Majesty. Which makes neighbors even less likely to report it. And even if they do…” Aaron trailed off, suddenly ill at ease.
“And if they do, they find that perhaps the guard in their neighborhood has been paid to look the other way,” the king finished. “Who wouldn’t want crime to go down on their patch?”
“As you say, Majesty.”
I wondered why Aaron was no longer a city guard, and if it was related.
The king grunted. He was quiet for a little while, and I wentback to classifying plants. We were passing through an area mostly given over to cactus. Cactus rarely bother being poisonous, though there are occasional exceptions. I eyed a barrel cactus by the side of the road, which had grown large enough to slump sideways. (People always say you can get water from a barrel cactus. This is true enough, but since it gives you diarrhea, it’s something of a wash in the hydration department.)
“But you can cure these people?” the king asked abruptly.
“Eh?” I’d lost my place in the conversation and briefly thought he was expecting me to cure a cactus.Lotus smoke. Right, right.
“Well…” I said, fussing with the reins to buy time, even though Ironwood hadn’t so much as twitched. “Sometimes. Not always. And it’s not a cure, exactly. Isavethem, but they’re still addicted to the smoke.”
He nodded. “Is there a cure for that?”
“Time.” Opium is another thing we haven’t found a cure for. The effects, fortunately, are cumulative rather than instantaneous, so we can still use it to blunt the pain when someone’s arm gets sawn off, provided we stop soon enough.
The king sighed. “Time is the thing that Snow may not have,” he said. “Though she’s lasted this long.” It was his turn to stare between his horse’s ears. “One of my advisors suggested that if itispoison, I should lock her in a windowless room and guard the door so that no one has access to it. Have a cook prepare her food with his own hands and feed half that food to his youngest child.”
“It sounds like a good way to give her rickets,” I said, before I remembered that I was being tactful.
