Page 21 of Potion Sickness

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s not sick in the traditional sense.” She drinks. “He’s over-full. There’s too much magic in him and his body has shut down. That’s what the sleep is. It’s not a curse and it’s not a coma, not the hospital kind. He’s processing.”

“Processing what?”

“Potions. More than one.” She sets the cup on the step beside her. “A potion leaves a signature. When somebody’s taken one, I can usually smell it on the breath and name it, the way you’d walk into a kitchen when someone is cooking a soup and say, like, ‘that’s onions’. Last night I leaned over him and it was like walking into a kitchen where somebody’s been cooking ten different stews all week. I know there’s more than one ingredient, but I can’t name a single one. They’ve all boiled together.”

“How many is more than one?”

“More than two. Past that I’m guessing.”

“Was it an accident? Did he do it to himself?”

“I don’t know.” She pauses. “Potions don’t play well together. Every witch who brews learns that first. You don’t take mine with somebody else’s, you don’t stack them, you finish one before you start the next. But people who buy potions don’t always get taught that. So we can easily picture a man who purchases a tonic for his voice from one person, and something for his face from another, and something to sleep from a third, and so on, and never mentions any of them to any of the others.”

“That fits him,” I say.

“It fits a lot of people. I’ve gotten orders like that,” she pauses. “There is another possibility, though. That somebody else fed it to him, dose by dose, until last night one more dose tipped him over. I just don’t know. I can’t tell you when the last dose was, and I can’t tell you whose hand it came from. I don’t know whether it was his own or someone else’s.”

“Can you fix him?” Englebert asks.

“Not until I know what’s already in him. You put the wrong thing on top of that mixture and you make it worse. You don’t put out a grease fire with water.” She glances at me.

“That was one time,” I say.

“It was a formative time.” She almost smiles, but then doesn’t have the reserves for it. “The likeliest thing is that he burns it off on his own. It could take days. Could take weeks. His body is doing the right thing, it just has a lot to get through. I’ll check him morning and night. But if somebody did this to him on purpose, we need to find out.”

Down the porch, the sun arrives on schedule and Maude begins to purr in his stolen square of it, the only creature present having a good morning.

“One more question,” I say. “Potions leave residue on the person. Do they leave it anywhere else?”

“On the vessel,” Annabel says. “The cup, the bottle, whatever carried it. On the hands that brewed it, for a day or so. On the cup for longer, even washed. Fainter, but it’s there.”

“How much longer?”

“Depends on the potion. A few days, even weeks. Years. It depends.”

“The goblets,” Englebert says, standing up. “He drank from a goblet, during the toast. Nobody was thinking about doing dishes last night. The banquet table will be exactly as it was when he collapsed.”

“Get dressed,” I tell Englebert. “You can meet with Vivian in person. I’ll drive.”

“Marigold,” he says. “I’m always dressed. And of course you’ll drive.”

“Get in the car.”

CHAPTER 7

Englebert rehearses his talking points the entire brief drive into town.

“Item one. Condolences, but brisk ones. Vivian respects brisk. Item two, the schedule. Item three, the stand-in question, which I will raise delicately.”

“You’ve never raised anything delicately in your entire life.”

“I raised you, in part, and look how you turned out. Item four⁠—”

“There’s no item four. If you get to item four, I’m pulling the emergency brake.”

The Community Center lot is empty except for Dana’s Subaru, parked crooked across two spaces. The lobby doors are unlocked and I can hear water running.