Page 49 of Hemlock & Silver
Look, I never said I was agoodworshipper.
“I’m not going to die,” I told myself. “I’m not. Snow’s been eating these for months now. She hasn’t died.”
Although shecouldhave built up an immunity over the last three months…
I sighed. I’d been so close to reassuring myself, too.
Whywould she keep eating the apples? She must have known that they were making her sick. I could have seen it if it was just an emetic—some people, as Nurse had said, had an illness like that—but surely she’d use something that didn’t make you feel as if you were going to puke up your toenails.
Was shedeliberatelypoisoning herself?
It seemed utterly absurd, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. People do absurd, irrational things all the time. Hell, Healer Michael had once told me of a case where a woman came in who was clearly in the early stages of hydrophobia, but hadn’t been bitten by a dog or a skunk or any of the usual suspects. “And it eventually came out that she had attempted to breastfeed a bat,” he said heavily. “Because it was injured and she worried it was hungry.”
I’d snorted in horrified amusement. You don’t want to laugh at someone who’s died such an awful death, but for the love of the saints, what was shethinking?
“The point,” Michael had said dryly, “is that if you think, ‘Surely no one would do that!’—well, someonewill, and probably they’ll be expecting you to fix it.”
Snow was so hedged around with guards and servants, though. How was she even getting the apples? It seemed impossible.
But then I remembered that smile I’d caught that very first day, the sly, secret smile in the mirror, and I wondered…
And then another, much more immediate thought struck me, and I sat bolt upright.
Chickens can’t vomit.
“Oh shit,” I muttered, and crawled in the direction of the bellpull.
Aaron and Javier entered my room five minutes later and discovered me crouched on the floor, greenish and shivering, with my hair hanging in damp strands over my face. I had achieved a tentative truce with my innards, but I wasn’t sure how long they would keep their end of the bargain.
Aaron’s eyes went wide. “Mistress Anja?”
Javier, somewhat more practically, pulled a dressing gown off a hook and wrapped it around me over my nap-rumpled clothes. He sniffed while he did it, clearly trying to see if I was reeking of alcohol, and apparently decided that I wasn’t.
I had a wild urge to ask for a hug. It wasn’t just the cold. There’s something about having been really ill that leaves you feeling wrung out and vulnerable, and I simultaneously wanted to crawl into my bed and never see another human again and to have someone pat me on my shoulder and say,There, there.
Sadly, I was pretty sure that you weren’t supposed to ask your bodyguards to do that.
“Should we get a healer?” Aaron asked.
I wasn’t going to waste words through my bile-ravaged throat to point out that Iwasa healer. “Need to go to my workshop,” I rasped instead. “Poison.”
Both men went still. Aaron’s sympathetic smile vanished. Javier, who spoke so rarely, said, in a voice that was flat and much too calm, “Tell us his name, mistress, and he will die.”
That was a strange feeling. I’d never had anyone offer to kill someone for me before. I didn’t doubt him at all. Explaining about the apple would take much too long. I shook my head. “Don’t know.”
My guards swung into action as smoothly as if they escorted retching charges all the time. (Actually, if they had ever been set to guard a drunkard, they probably did have some experience with it.) Javier got my arm over his shoulders and got me to my feet. Aaron grabbed the empty pitcher from the washroom in case I needed to be sick again, and the two of them led me out into the hallwayand in the direction of my workroom. Aaron had the lamp from my nightstand and pushed doors open. I had wanted a hug, but being half carried by Javier was not the same thing. I clutched the pitcher for dear life and hoped I wouldn’t need it. (The mouth of the pitcher was very narrow, and I did not trust my stomach’s aim.)
Somehow, we got to the workroom. Aaron hastily lit the lamps. I imagine they expected me to immediately begin preparing an antidote to the poison. Instead, I fell to my knees in front of the rooster’s cage. He was a dark, immobile lump in the back of it. I swung the door open and yanked the dish of corn out, cursing. Had I sentenced him to a horrible death?
(Yes, I know, the wholepointof the rooster was to test for poisons. I told you I hated doing it, though, and since I already knew the apple was toxic, the rooster’s death wasn’t necessary. Also, I wouldn’t sentence my worst enemy to death by nausea.)
I poked the rooster. “Come on,” I muttered. Had he eaten any of the corn? Or had he just gone straight to sleep? “Come on…”
“Rrrr-rrr-rrr,” the rooster said, the sound of a disgruntled chicken being woken up against his will.
“Um, Mistress Anja?” Aaron said, the sound of a baffled bodyguard watching his charge determinedly poking a chicken.
The rooster’s eyes were round, not half-lidded, and his comb was bright. He mostly seemed annoyed. It looked like he hadn’t eaten any corn before going to sleep. Chickens pass things quicker than we do. If I gave him a day with only water, maybe the apple would go out of his system.
