Hemlock & Silver

by T. Kingfisher

At thirty-five, I was more than old enough to know that evil could present a fair face, but I had never heard that it got tired. Quite the opposite, really. Evil is relentlessly energetic.

Physicians could get away with knowing too much about poison. Middle-aged spinsters could not.

I was a child with a child’s attention span. Many adults think this is no more than a butterfly’s, flittering from thought to thought, but they have forgotten how, in some children, it is as sharp and pointed as a stiletto. Mine was focused now.

There is a crazy-wild delight that comes over you when you discover something new, something extraordinary. If you try to share that and people look at you blankly, it’s crushing. But if there’s someone else there to say really?! and take fire with enthusiasm alongside you—well, that will keep you going for a long time.

“It’s been three months, and we still don’t know what the opposite of hemlock is. In fact, I think I’m even more confused than when we started!” “It happens that way sometimes,” Scand said mildly, sliding a bookmark into the volume before him. “Learning just makes you aware of how much there is to learn.”

One corner of his mouth twisted up in a smile. “That’s the thing about learning. You get to keep it.”

“If you keep asking questions, you will find answers. I promise you.” It took me more than twenty years, but in the end, I proved him right.

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.)

Still, what else could I do? I had to try. Sometimes you get a miracle. Mostly you don’t, but you still have to make space for the miracle to happen, just in case.

The human body is a strange combination of incredibly fragile and unspeakably tough.

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.

Tea, fortunately, did not seem to enrage the apple the way dinner had. I drank two cups and decided that since I was alive, I might as well stay that way.

No sense asking why he was like this. He was a cat. If cats were helpful, they’d be dogs.

Gut feelings aren’t very scientific, but they’re often the result of a lot of observations that you don’t know that you’re making, so I wasn’t ready to discount mine entirely.

Horses can’t vomit any more than chickens can, and their digestion is so fragile that I’m sometimes amazed they don’t catch fire and explode.

I drank more water. My eyes felt gritty. (That’s caused by your tears evaporating while you sleep, incidentally. Tears are salty, so when your eyes dry out, tiny salt crystals get left behind. Bodies are so marvelously revolting.)

Oh. Oh, that was nice. I’d never had a man braid my hair before. He wasn’t running his fingers through it in an erotic fashion or anything—he was, if anything, ruthlessly competent as he scraped it back—but I could feel my scalp tingling in a way that made my toes curl. Oh Saints, I do not need another fetish right now. I

Javier gave me a brooding look. An actual brooding look, not the dramatic reflecting-on-personal-woe-to-be-interesting kind. That one only looks good on poets. This one made him look thoughtful and a little stern and altogether too handsome for a man in my bedroom whom I couldn’t do a damn thing about.

How would a potato preach to the other potatoes? You just don’t get that many missionaries among root vegetables.

“And of course there’s the spiders, including two varieties of widow and—” “I retract the question,” said Aaron, holding up both hands. “And I will now retract myself, because my skin is crawling. Javier, if you survive the horrors of nature, I’ll see you later.”

I wondered that I’d ever thought him humorless. Or possibly he was like most of the healers I knew and his humor grew in proportion to the direness of the situation. Certainly the amount he talked did.

There were no severed limbs and faces lying on the ground below, which was a relief, and also not something that I’d ever had to worry about before.

I suppose there are evil people who are solid and reliable and even-tempered, but either you don’t meet a lot of them, or they hide being evil remarkably well. Either way, I imagine they pay their staff quite handsomely.

I winced. He’d thought it through, more than I had. Even though I’d long since had the belief that I was the smartest person in the room knocked out of me, it was humbling.

The silence dragged like a stick through mud. “So…” Javier began. “… What do we do now?” I finished. He grunted. So did I. “I’m going to go see what weapons we’ve got available,” he said finally. “And try to squash the rumors.” “Godspeed,” I said. “I’m going to take a nap.”

Scand had said that any chemistry experiment has three outcomes. “Either what you want happens, nothing happens, or it explodes.” (As it turned out, there was a fourth option, namely ‘it turns into a tarry black sludge and ruins a test tube,’ but Scand had claimed that was just a subset of nothing happening.)

He grunted. It was the resigned well, shit grunt. That seemed to pretty well cover the situation.

“I’m here because of a bite of potato. How is that possible?” I grunted, because I didn’t have an answer. It turned out that grunts were very useful. I’d picked that up from Javier. Eventually we’d probably just be grunting at each other instead of talking. It was a shame that we were going to die, because I would have liked to see that.

That’s humans for you, I suppose. In dreadful danger, with the weight of the world crushing us down, we’ll somehow still find ourselves thinking, I wonder if he likes me? I didn’t know if that was a great virtue or a mortal failing. Both, maybe.

If I blurted out something like, By the way, I’m falling in love with you, there was a chance that Javier would reciprocate. There was also another, much larger chance that I’d just have succeeded in making the last hours of our lives incredibly awkward. Tough call.

I certainly hated it when amateurs walked in and started giving me their opinion on how I could cure rabies with two quarts of brandy and a raw onion. (The recipes varied wildly, but there was always alcohol and always, always an onion.)

Father had said many times that you never judge people by how they look, but he meant things like cleft lips and goiters, not hundreds of arms pasted together in a composite abomination. Still, the same principle applied.

I had to look away. It’s not polite to be sickened by people who are doing you a favor.

Javier laid Snow down in a cloud of fragrance. The off-white canvas mattress cover was darker than her skin and made her look even paler by comparison. If you were a poetic soul, maybe you’d say she looked like a princess in an enchanted slumber. To me, she mostly just looked dead.

The pillow took him in the face, and he fell back, laughing. I found an undamaged length of rib cage and poked him in it. “Obviously it’s not that.”

Should you happen to be dying and have a choice between me and a cactus to nurse you, the cactus will likely be less prickly and do a better job.

One thing scientists do know is that there are mysteries that will never be solved in our lifetimes. Perhaps not for a thousand lifetimes to come. Scand always said that was part of the point. What good is life, if there’s nothing left to discover?