Page 26 of Potion Sickness

“Why would they?”

“To make somebody love them.”

Addie thinks about this while she carries the cup to the shelf. “Why would anyone want that?” she says. “You’d know it wasn’t real love. You’d know it was just the potion making them do it.”

“You’d think that would stop people,” Annabel says. “Next.”

Englebert has migrated from the mat to the top of a book cart. Bandit has given up on the argument and gone back to sleep.

The bell rings and a customer comes in. She wants to know if a certain salve is gluten-free, and ends up leaving with a tin and some pressed flowers.

I unwrap number fourteen and check Dana’s map. 14 — D. CARTER. It’s a wide pewter cup with a dented lip. Damien drank the toast out of it just before he collapsed.

Annabel reads it the way she’s read every other cup.

“Well,” she says.

“Well what?”

“Well… nothing.” She sets it down and looks at it. “There’s nothing there. It’s muddled, same as the rest. This cup’s been around, like all of them, but there is nothing new in it. Even after it was washed, if a fresh dose of anything had gone into this cup last night, or any time recently, I’d be able to tell.” She turns the cup slowly by the stem. “Whatever tipped him over didn’t come out of this goblet.”

“But he drank the toast and then went down instantly.”

“I believe you. But the dose wasn’t in the cup, which means it was already in him when he raised it. The banquet was the last straw, maybe. The excitement or the exertion or something. But whatever it was that took him out was consumed before he ever got to that table.”

“Should we keep checking?” I ask. “Maybe he drank from the wrong goblet.”

“We’ll keep checking,” she nods.

The unwashed cups come out sticky. The corn syrup has set into a red-brown varnish exactly the way Dana said it would, but Annabel reads straight through it. “Sugar is just sugar,” she says. “It doesn’t hide anything.”

There’s nothing of note, at least for a while.

“These are clean,” Annabel reports, and Addie writes it down. “Clean, clean, clean.”

We get to the bottom of the box, where there’s one last cup — Lady Macbeth’s cup. Annabel doesn’t get past the rim. Her eyes open wide.

“There’s something here,” she says. “A fresh working. It went in on top of the drink, or with it.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” she says, slowly. “I can tell you what it isn’t, though. It isn’t a heart philter. It isn’t a sleep draught. It definitely isn’t anything in my inventory. It’s bitter. Sort of resinous. And the base feels wrong, somehow. Every potion I know starts from water, wine, or honey. This started from something… different.”

“That’s Ms. Pru’s cup,” Addie says. “Number nine is Pru.”

“Did she drink?” I ask. “At the toast. She raised the cup, but did she actually drink?”

“I wasn’t there, remember?”

“I was there and I don’t know. Everyone was watching Damien.”

My notes from that night are in my bag and I know without checking that they say nothing about whether Lady Macbeth took a drink.

“They could’ve been switched at the table. Whoever did the prop blocking could’ve made a mistake.”

“But everyone knows Pru gets the big cup,” Addie says.

“People make mistakes,” Annabel says.