Page 9 of Hemlock & Silver
“He’s already seen me in my worst gown. I don’t think he cares.”
“Heprobably doesn’t, but everyone else will.”
I sighed. “I have a perfectly respectable wardrobe. I go out in public in it all the time.”
“Yes, but you look like a nun.”
“Isobel, I’m going to try to cure the king’s daughter. If I succeed, no one willcarewhat I’m wearing.”
Her expression was unexpectedly grave. “You know that half the nobles won’t care if you succeed or not, if you’re wearing the wrong thing when you do it.”
“That’s not true,” I said, more because I didn’t want it to be true than because she was wrong. I slammed another trunk shut. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter whattheythink. The king’s the one who matters.”
“The nobles are the ones most likely to buy Father’s stock,” Isobel said. Which was also true, so far as it went.And if I fail, we will lose buyers. Possibly a lot of buyers. And backers on future projects will pull out, and without backers, there will be nothing for anyone to buy anyway.
Nor would my sisters escape unscathed. Isobel was married toa man who had invested heavily in his father-in-law’s business, and while Catherine’s husband was in the military, who could say what promotions might go to other, less worthy men, if his family was in disgrace?
I braced my arms on the lid of the trunk and stared at it, though I didn’t see it. I was seeing my sisters and their families and my nieces and nephews and my father, who was no longer young.
And behind them, faceless, the others. The ones I didn’t know yet. The ones that I could sometimes save, but not if I was three days away.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The edges of the rattan trunk bit into my fingers, stamping wave patterns into my skin. “I never meant for this to happen.”
In the silence that followed, I heard the rustle of Isobel’s skirts as she rose. Then my sister’s arms went around me, and she said, “Dear heart. No one could have predicted this. Not even you.”
I made a little choked sound that might have been a laugh or a sob. I couldn’t tell and was afraid to find out. “No,” I said, straightening up. “No, I don’t think anyone could have.”
“Besides,” Isobel said, “I feel sorry for the girl, don’t you? Losing her sister and her mother like that, and being poisoned as well.”
“Assuming it’s poison at all.” I sighed. Of course, I felt a pang of sympathy for the girl. I wasn’t a monster.But a king’s daughter has a whole kingdom to rely on, and some of the people I’m trying to help can’t even rely on themselves…“I don’t even know how long I’ll be gone,” I said.
“As long as it takes,” said Isobel. “Perhaps you’ll walk in, recognize it immediately, and be back home within the week.”
“Your faith in me is touching. More likely I’ll be stuck there for months. And what do I tell the king if I can’t figure it out? ‘I’m sorry, I’m stumped, can I please go home now?’”
“You always say that it’s probablynotpoison. Just tell him that.” Isobel had been subjected to a great many of my lectures about how rarely people are actually deliberately poisoned, and I wasgratified to see that apparently she’d listened to at least one of them.
“I tried,” I said. “But royalty is… different.”
That was something of an understatement. Up until the time I was six years old, our king had been a man called Bastian the Demon. It was not a title given out of affection. He had been powerful, violent, and paranoid, convinced that his courtiers were part of a grand conspiracy to poison him. No one, from the lowliest servant to the highest noble, was safe. Those around him said that Bastian would be calm, even charming, for days at a time, then would suddenly shift, almost in midsentence, and lash out. The king’s guard would appear on people’s doorsteps in the night and take them away for their role in imagined conspiracies. Rumor had it that he’d once stabbed his own poison taster in the middle of a royal feast, rolled the man’s body onto the table, and proceeded to eat the rest of the courses off the dead man’s back.
(But Anja,you ask me,why didn’t the nobles just overthrow the Demon?Good question. My guess is that no one wanted to be the first one to step up, because if no one stepped up behind you, you were dead. Monarchy, as the ancient philosopher Margay the Younger wrote, is a terrible form of government, but at least there’s always someone around to blame.)
The king—our current king, the one who appeared in my workroom two days ago—was the Demon’s nephew. He had been kept at the palace as something between an heir and a hostage, since the Demon could never quite decide if his nephew was in danger from the conspiracy or a leading figure in it.
Before he came to a final judgment on the matter, Bastian died, much to the relief of everyone in the kingdom, with the possible exception of his mistress. Ironically, the autopsy showed that hehadbeen poisoned, which led to questions that no one really wanted answered. The Demon was buried quickly, his nephew took the throne, people stopped disappearing, and that was that.
So now here we were, thirty years later, with the king’s daughter maybe going the same way as her uncle. At least, I couldn’t rule it out.
“I’ll do my best. You know I will. But if the physicians couldn’t figure it out, how will I? And in the meantime, how many peopleherethat Icouldhelp will…” I trailed off. If I didn’t say the worddieout loud, maybe it wouldn’t happen. Which was completely irrational, of course, and unworthy of a scholar, but I still didn’t say the word out loud.
“Is there someone else they can go to?” Isobel asked.
I grunted. After a minute I said, somewhat grudgingly, “Healer Michael can handle most things, I suppose.” This was ungracious even for me. Michael lacked my encyclopedic knowledge of poison, but he was the better healer in every way that counted. “Except for the lotus-smoke cases. No one else does those.”
No one else even tries. Everyone knows it’s hopeless, except me.
Isobel knew better than to say anything. I squeezed her hand instead. We sat together in the emptied workroom, the sun shining on bare wood and tile instead of glass. In her cage, the chime-adder shifted with a jingle of miniature bells.
