No one bothered me for two days, and then I heard footsteps and looked up to see my tutor standing in the entrance to the library.
“Anja? What are you doing here? It’s late…” He trailed off, looking at the stacks of books that lay open around me, stacked in teetering piles, which made it fairly obvious what I was doing.
His name was Scand, and like most tutors, he was a scholar who needed money for his research and had consented to teach children languages and natural history and the rudiments of classical scholarship to get it. I knew that he was an old friend of my father’s, but I’d never given him much thought beyond that. He was an indifferent teacher, and his students were indifferent pupils, and of all of them, I suspect I was not the one that he would expect to break the mold.
But he saw me sitting there, surrounded by open books, and he recognized at once what he was seeing—someone digging through every volume they could lay hands on, trying to find a specific piece of knowledge that theyknewmust be written down somewhere, if only they could find it.
I looked up at Scand and I didn’t see the mediocre teacher—I saw an adult who often knew things that I didn’t. I said, “Anthony died of eating poison hemlock. There must be a cure.How do I find it?”
It was late, and by rights he should have told me to go up to bed. The woman who taught us deportment would have taken one look at the books I was reading and been thoroughly appalled. Medical textbooks with anatomical drawings were not considered appropriate for eleven-year-olds, and the fact that I wasn’t particularly interested in the pages with genitals and was instead puzzling over the digestive system would not have soothed her. (Besides, my sisters and I had found the drawings of genitals years earlier and giggled over them then.)
Scand, however, pulled out a chair of his own and said, “What have you found so far?”
“I can’t find anything,” I said miserably. “There must be a cure. Everything has a cure. Why isn’t anyone looking for this one?” I slapped the table, which I think startled me more than it did Scand. I was half-drunk on frustration. Here was a problem thatcouldbe solved, and solving it would make the world better,so why wasn’t it solved yet? “Why isn’teveryonelooking for it?”
“Someone may be,” Scand said. “Or they started to and then got distracted trying to find a cure for mercury poisoning or lead or scorpion stings. Or they may be looking, but they still can’t find the answer. You can’tforcea medical breakthrough.”
He was talking to me like I was an adult, so I was determined not to burst into tears, which is what I wanted to do. I wanted very much to force a medical breakthrough. It wasn’trightthat your life could intersect with a little white root and then you were simply dead, without possibility of appeal. I was eleven and still believed in the fundamental justice of the world. It seemed as if I should be able to bring poison hemlock to the attention of someone—a saint or scholar or doctor or priest—and they would agree that this was a terrible oversight andfixit.
“Most of these books don’t even mention hemlock,” I said. “They spend whole chapters on arsenic and then mention in passing that there are ‘various unwholesome herbs.’ None of them even know how hemlockworks.”
“We’ll have to find other books, then,” Scand said, and thatwewarmed a place in my chest that had been cold since Anthony died.
“Here,” I said. “I did find this one thing.” I pulled one of the books toward me, running my finger over a passage that I could practically recite by now. “For as the Key fits unto the Lock, because the Lock is its mirror image, so the Antidote fits unto the Poison as its own mirror image. Look then unto the Poison’s mirror, and so unlock the Curative to match it, each to each.” I swept my hands across the stacks of books. “It makes sense. But how do I find the mirror image? What is theoppositeof hemlock?”
My tutor shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ll help you look.”
I was extremely lucky to have Scand, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. With the self-centeredness of youth and wealth, I never questioned that a tutor might spend dozens of hours a week helping their student learn about poison. I had simply assumed that it was part of his job. When I finally realized how unusual it was—mostly by listening to my cousins complain abouttheirtutors—I was intensely embarrassed by how long it had taken.
When I asked him about it, many years later, he laughed. “I was bored,” he said. “I couldn’t pursue my own work any longer, and I was adrift with nothing to occupy me. And then you turned up in the library, hunched over a book as big as you were, and it interested me. I hadn’t been interested in a question in quite a long time.”
Regardless of why he’d helped me, he had. Not by pointing me in the right directions, but simply by being there. 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 sayreally?!and take fire with enthusiasm alongside you—well, that will keep you going for a long time. Even though his great passion was optics and light and refraction, he had a good scholar’s joy in discovery, and he gave it to me unstintingly.
Scand also championed my cause, such as it was, to my family.Because of that, I was allowed to keep going. I overheard him talking to my father—
Well, no. Ishamelessly eavesdroppedon him talking to my father. He’d prepared a list of books that our library didn’t have, which might help pursue our study of antidotes, and brought them to my father to ask if he might purchase them. I slunk along after him and waited outside Father’s study, hoping that none of the servants would happen to walk by and see me with my ear pressed against the door.
“Upset over her cousin, is she?” Father asked. I could practically hear his raised eyebrow.
“I think it’s more than that,” Scand said. “Anja wants toknow. It’s as much about finding an answer as anything else.”
“Still. All these treatises on poisons… Seems a bit morbid for a young girl, eh?”
I wanted to burst in and argue that itwasn’tmorbid, it was theoppositeof morbid, it was about medicine and saving lives. I bit my tongue hard and listened for Scand’s reply.
“I can’t speak to that,” Scand said, sounding much more casual than I felt, “but as her tutor, I can tell you that her reading’s improved more in a month than in three years of my teaching. And half the books are in Tohalish, and she’s going through them with a dictionary in hand.” (Which was true so far as it went. My everyday Tohalish was still abysmal, but I could now carry on quite a good conversation about the effects of arsenic. Cook, who was from Tohal originally and normally helped me practice, had banned all such discussion from the kitchen the day that I learned to conjugate the wordvomit.)
“Ah, well,” Father said. “Whatever keeps her occupied, I suppose. I’m sure she’ll get bored with it soon enough.”
My father was a gifted merchant but a poor prophet. My interest did not wane, but only grew deeper and more intense. Formy twelfth birthday, instead of a pony, I requested the six-volumeMateria Botanica. “I could have bought three or four ponies for that price,” he grumbled, but he bought it, and I lost myself in hundreds of drawings of herbs, each with painstakingly hand-tinted plates. Most of them didn’t even grow out in the desert, but I memorized them anyway. My mind filled up with leaves and roots and symptoms of poisoning, though most of them ended the same way.
Aconite:vomiting, burning sensation, sweating, confusion, and finally death…
Belladonna:blurred vision, scarlet rash, delirium, convulsions, death…
Foxglove:confusion, vomiting, irregular heartbeat, difficulty breathing, death…
Hellebore:vertigo, thirst, swollen tongue, collapse, death…
