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.

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.

Here was a problem that could be solved, and solving it would make the world better, so why wasn’t it solved yet?

I was eleven and still believed in the fundamental justice of the world.

People had said all sorts of things to me when my mother died, and half of them had been insulting and the other half simply inane.

The ratio of good rooster to violent hen rapist seems to be about one in ten, I don’t know why.

Then she flung herself at the bed and flopped down on it, with a sigh of such world-weariness that it could only have come from someone under twenty.

“It’s not yours! You have no right to take it!” She pummeled me furiously, and, for lack of anything better to do, I did what I had done at twelve when my sister Catherine did the same thing. I put my hand on top of Snow’s head and held her at arm’s length while she flailed.

It does not matter how many cats there are! Any nonzero number of talking cats is significant!

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.”

Welp

Cats all know they’re smarter than you are, and they’re smug as hell about it.

dicey.” 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.

There are few things in life more disdainful than a one-eyed cat. I could actually feel my hair withering under the force of his stare.

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?