Hemlock & Silver

by T. Kingfisher

One for sixteen sounds like a bargain, sure, but turn it the other way, and you’re saying that a child should’ve died simply because it was inspirational. I’m pretty sure that’s monstrous. Maybe the point of gods and saints is that they can make the monstrous choices that people can’t.

Saint Toad has dominion over the melancholic humor and the bowels, and laxative bottles often have toads stamped on the labels. People make pilgrimages to the big Toad shrine to the west of Four Saints mostly to ask for wealth, which is also His domain, but more than a few go to ask for regularity. (I am not here to judge. In the course of testing things on myself, I’ve had more than one occasion to beg for Saint Toad’s intervention.)

This time she did turn back to the gentleman on her left. His expression crumpled, a man discovering that the headsman was not out sick after all. I applied myself to the roast beef, 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 next morning, I took full advantage of the bath and presented myself at Snow’s door, well scrubbed and professional. Hopefully professional. Professional-esque, anyway. I was staking a lot on those green scarves.

That was why I wasn’t really a healer. A good healer wants to help the person. Whereas what I wanted was to solve the problem.

“Nurse won’t let him sleep with me at night,” Snow said, clearly aggrieved. “But he loves me.” I try not to judge anyone, man or beast, by appearances, but let’s just say that I had significant doubts that a cat with that expression loved anything except murder.

It was possible that human psychology wouldn’t work on a cat, but I suspected that this might. Cats all know they’re smarter than you are, and they’re smug as hell about it. (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?” said Javier. “More nerves?” “They’re a trifle unsteady today.” “Can’t imagine why.” We stared into the pit some more.

“Interrogating someone? I thought you said that your job was just standing around.” “Sometimes I stood around interrogation rooms. The point still stands.”

We don’t actually have gods in my country, as you may have noticed, just saints. The story goes that our gods were pitiless and cruel, and in despair, humanity began to pray instead to the beasts of heaven, to Rabbit and Bird, Adder and Toad, and all the rest. The beasts of heaven rose up in their numbers and slew the pitiless gods, and since those days, we have called only upon the saints.

“After all this, you don’t believe in fairy tales?”

“She thinks a drop of blood on the mirror is what woke her up. How is that possible?” “I’m here because of a bite of potato. How is that possible?”

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.