Hemlock & Silver

by T. Kingfisher

“Well?” he said. I blinked at him. “Well what, Your Majesty?” He made a quick, impatient gesture. “The rumors that I killed my wife. I told you, they’re true.”

“I am grasping at straws. Don’t think I don’t know it.” You say that, but it will happen anyway. But what choice do I have? I blew out my breath in a long sigh. “Then, Your Majesty, I would be honored to grasp at them alongside you.”

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.

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

“That’s not true,” I said, more because I didn’t want it to be true than because she was wrong.

Sometimes you get a miracle. Mostly you don’t, but you still have to make space for the miracle to happen, just in case.

prayer was what you did when you had done everything else you could possibly do.

Maybe the point of gods and saints is that they can make the monstrous choices that people can’t.

but no matter how you slice it, snakes do not appreciate being on horseback.

I had succeeded in pushing off my fears until later. Now later had arrived, and I wasn’t somehow magically equipped to deal with it.

wondering whether I’d struck a blow for rational treatment of snakes or simply convinced a random noblewoman that I was a raving lunatic.

The ruler of this kitchen had the soft, comfortable shape of a fresh-baked loaf of bread and the savage gaze of a bird of prey.

They say that poison is a woman’s weapon, but in my experience, both sexes are likely to use it when they’re trying to be clever. It’s just that men also occasionally beat someone to death with a hammer. Women rarely do that.

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

I ran into his words like a kitten into a wall.

Oh Saints, I do not need another fetish right now. I particularly did not need one centered on a man who had looked at me like I was a piece of salmon left out in the sun for too long.

You just don’t get that many missionaries among root vegetables.

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?

Fortunately I’d given up counting the number of times I’d been outwitted by a twelve-year-old in the last week. It would have been too depressing.

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.