He nodded.
I suddenly got a lot more interested in the weird collection.
“There’s probably residue on most of them,” Rhea said, looking at me apologetically. “These weren’t just for show. She used them. She wouldn’t drink from anything else.”
Fred whistled through his teeth. “Wow, paranoid much?”
“It wasn’t paranoia,” Rhea said. “It had been prophesied that she would die from poison if she wasn’t vigilant.”
“But she was Pythia. Wouldn’t she know if someone was trying to slip her something?”
“How would she know?”
“I just thought she’d get a vision or something.”
“We don’t see visions about ourselves.”
“Oh.” Fred looked like he hadn’t known that. “Well, looks like she took it seriously. Sharks’ teeth?”
I glanced at Rico, who had just jerked his hand back again, cursing softly. But I couldn’t help him. So I found a spot on the ruined sofa and sat down, and a moment later, Rhea joined me. Like we were having a polite chat instead of plundering a dead woman while thieves battered at the door and a bomb ticked away its last minutes.
“A cure rather than a preventative,” she told Fred. “Sharks’ teeth set in an agate cup—both said to render poison harmless. Like the bezoar.”
“And these?” Fred pulled a miscellany of items out of the bottom of the sack. A small gold cup set with rubies. A handful of precious stones, some the size of a marble, others large as hens’ eggs. A tangle of amulets. Some odd charred bones.
“For an extra precaution, you could add a bezoar or an amulet to the cup,” Rhea explained. “Lady Phemonoe usually used several.”
“But that’s . . . just superstition. She had to know that, right? It doesn’t work.”
“It worked,” I said. “Just not the way it was intended.”
“Come again?”
“It’s what killed her.”
Fred looked down at the cup in his hands and dropped it like it was hot.
“They’re not going to hurt you,” I told him. “It was an amulet that did it. It contained arsenic—”
“Arsenic?”
“—because of an old belief that poison attracted poison and would draw it out of whatever it was dunked in.”
“That . . . seems like a really bad idea.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be able to get out.”
“But it did,” he pointed out.
“It had help.”
“Help?” That was Rhea. She’d been looking back and forth between the two of us, but now her eyes focused on me.
And I remembered: not too many people
knew for certain how Agnes had died. There had been rumors, of course. But the reputable—read Circle-controlled—papers had done a pretty good job of hushing them up.
I guess they didn’t want to give people ideas.