Page 38 of Hemlock & Silver
Healer Michael had a look that he got sometimes, the look of a man who understood something too well and would far rather be baffled. “For some women, their children are never really separate people. This woman didn’t think of it as murder.” He waved his hand toward the door to the autopsy room, with its small, sad occupant.
“Because she thought she owned him,” I said bitterly, but Michael was already shaking his head.
“Sometimes, certainly, but not in this case. I spoke with her, you know. She’s a sad creature, and she’s genuinely confused that this is being treated as murder. In her mind, she was hurtingherself, not anyone else. If anything, she thought of this as a sort of suicide.”
Saints, but I wish you were here, I told Michael inside my head.You could tell mewhythings are happening, and maybe then I could figure outhowthey’re happening.
For that matter, why had Nurse even told me any of this?
I tried to pretend I was Michael and understood people. She’d told me because she derived something from telling me. All I’d done was say, awkwardly, “It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t possibly have known.” But she’d seemed satisfied with that, so…
Absolution,I thought.She is looking for absolution that she didn’t cause the tragedy.
Well and good. But there was another tragedy unfolding in slow motion, and that was the one I was here to solve.
Did the dead queen have anything to do with Snow’s condition? It seemed unlikely, given that she was, y’know,dead. But a woman who stabbed one daughter might not balk at poisoning another one, if she saw them both as an extension of herself, and it was possible that she’d given Snow something, some object, that would slowly kill the girl over months. Possible even that she’d given it to her long before killing Rose.
Or possibly it didn’t have anything to do with the dead queen at all, and I was grasping at straws because I couldn’t find a damn thing otherwise.
The rooster had completed his circuit of my workroom, made a deposit on the floor, and was now hunkered down in a sunbeam from the window. The light picked out iridescent greens from his otherwise-mangy tail feathers.
“I’m putting this off,” I told him, “because I don’t want to go through Snow’s things. But I guess I don’t have a choice, do I?”
Maybe it was because the king was still in residence. Maybe it was the fact that I apologized profusely or that I was so obviously trying to be respectful of her privacy. Regardless, Snow did not argue. I had expected a scene on par with the way she’d insulted the maids, but instead she sat down in the corner and watched. She had a faint, superior smile on her face.
You won’t find anything,that smile said.
You’re being paranoid and reading too much into a twelve-year-old’s smile, I told myself.
With the help of the maids, I went systematically through rows and rows of dresses, checking pockets and trimmings, even taking small swatches of fabric, because there are some dyes that use arsenic for coloring. I checked every jewelry box, every necklace and earring, every lotion and powder. I even carefully snipped a page corner from three different dog-eared books, because everyone’s heard the story about pages that poison you when you lick your finger to turn them. (I can’t swear it wouldn’t work, but I’ve never heard of itactuallyhappening.)
The only time that Snow showed any emotion was when I reached into a drawer and drew out a small silver case, perhaps three inches long. Tarnish had blackened the deeper grooves of a floral pattern, but the edge by the clasp, where your thumb would rub, was worn smooth.
Snow moved then, just a little, as if she had started to rise, then thought better of it. I flicked open the case and found a miniature portrait of a woman inside.
She had a heart-shaped face and hair a shade darker than Snow’s. Her eyes were large and gazed at the viewer with disconcerting openness. You could read loneliness in that gaze, but hope curled under it, as if she wished very much for a friend.
“My mother,” said Snow. It was the first time that she’d spoken aloud since the process began.
I could see the resemblance. The same shape to the mouth, the same fragile prettiness. I don’t know why it surprised me that Snow would have kept a portrait. It certainly didn’t surprise me that she’d kept it out of sight.
What did you say at a time like that? What could you say?
“She was very beautiful,” I said at last.
Snow’s smile slipped. “Yes,” she said solemnly. Her eyes wereold for a moment, as old as the women pouring ashes into spirit houses, as if she were mourning the loss of a daughter, not a mother. “Yes, she was.”
I nodded and closed the case, returning it carefully to its drawer. By the time I finished turning the rooms upside down, Snow’s smiling mask was back in place and she was only twelve again.
I took the pile of samples I’d gathered down to the workshop, but I was already fairly sure that there was nothing in them that would bring me any closer to learning how the king’s daughter was being poisoned.
The last day passed. I went to bed that night, hoping for an epiphany in my sleep. The ancient philosopher Krathos is said to have dreamed of dividing a bar of bronze and a bar of lead into smaller and smaller pieces, and woke to invent the theory of elemental atoms and molecules.
All I woke up with was a headache.
I stared at the bed-curtain for a few minutes, dread knotting tighter and tighter in my stomach, then sighed, got to my feet, and washed my face. The woman in the mirror had dark circles under her eyes, but otherwise looked remarkably well for someone who felt like I did.
I took five minutes to cover the dark circles with a little makeup, not because I am particularly vain, but because it felt like putting on armor before going to face the enemy.
