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.

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.)

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.

“But smoking lotus isn’t a capital crime. The people who run the dens are the criminals, and they never end up here.”

“Fear is like a balloon,” he said, “and it blows up bigger and bigger. When it finally pops, relief comes rushing in to fill the space. The larger the fear, the larger the relief afterward. Then they have to find a way to let off that relief, and one of those ways is by dumping it all over the healer.”

And there were servants and guards and horses and grooms, and also a strangely large number of people who were going simply because the king was going and who seemed to fulfill no function whatsoever.

Also, the majority of them are absolute bastards. The ratio of good rooster to violent hen rapist seems to be about one in ten, I don’t know why.

You’ll laugh, but mirrors make me a bit uneasy. They’re fine during the day, but I’ve never liked them at night. I go out of the way not to look into the ones at home after dark. It’s not rational and probably doesn’t befit a serious scholar, but I just have this instinctive fear that if I look in one, I’ll see something moving that shouldn’t be.

Same, though

Perhaps it was pleasant, if you were a king, to spend a little time when no one wanted anything from you and you didn’t have to worry about anything more pressing than avoiding a cactus spine.

Strange as it sounds, this stung a bit. It’s one thing to know that a cat holds you in mild contempt, quite another to have it actually insult you in language you understand.

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

(This is not to say that there aren’t kind and loyal and humble cats out there. There probably are. I’m just saying that even the nicest cat in the world thinks it’s funny when you fall down the stairs.)

“Perhaps we don’t want to throw rocks into the mysterious hole in the unnatural mirror-world?”

“I’ll check on you tomorrow,” he said, as I opened the door to let him out. “I’ll try not to be dead,” I promised him, and closed the door.

He opened the door, slipped outside, then gestured to me, something complicated with two fingers. I assumed it meant it was safe to exit, though it could have meant anything up to I have decided that I would like curry for dinner.

Much is made about the aggression of roosters toward people, but I’ve always felt that was a sign of poor husbandry. If a rooster attacks humans, you eat him. This solves the problem nicely, and you get a chicken dinner out of it. It also removes them from the gene pool, so the next generation of roosters will often be rather more pleasant.

So Hemlock came about mostly because I read a lot of nonfiction about poison, but also because I find mirrors at night deeply creepy and because I have a one-eyed gray cat who believes that he is a god.

I love this acknowledgement so much