Bodies of Healing Magic

One

There was nothing beautiful about a body’s death. But a city could be beautiful in a dying way, especially in the last days before you left it. Especially if you weren’t leaving by choice, and would give anything to stay.

Moyna gauged the distance between her rooftop and the next. The soles of her boots gripped the rough tiles.

She clutched her satchel firmly to her hip and launched into the air, which cradled her for a heartbeat before she landed on the roof of the next building.

Moyna blinked hard. The image was so vivid it was a surprise not to be staring down at her own sprawled body.

If she didn’t die at once, she’d have time to be found.

For someone to see that grey robe and raise the alarm.

There weren’t as many healers living in this quarter as in the richer ones closer to the old city, but there’d be one or two.

They’d be summoned at once. And they’d drop every other obligation of their morning to save her; a fellow healer, or nearly, couldn’t be allowed to wastefully die in a dirty alley.

And Moyna, freshly healed, would climb to her feet and go straight to the Academie and sit the Grand Exam as if nothing had happened.

Good thing she’d made the leap. She might have missed her tram otherwise, and her exam group would have asked questions about the bloodstains.

And her ankle was fine. She didn’t need magic to tell her that.

Moyna started running again, and this time didn’t pause until she hit the roof of the bakery.

The huge chimney spilled smoke against the sky from the hot exhalations of the ovens on the ground floor.

Moyna took the wrought-iron fire ladder down the side of the building and stepped, breathless, through the back door of the bakery proper, where the hot, yeasty scent hit her right in the salivary glands.

The bakery would be opening soon. Emmelot was poring over the account books, surrounded by trays of fresh-baked buns, while green-aproned girls busied themselves stocking the shelves out front.

In her late school-summers, before her Academie studies began, Moyna had worn one of those green aprons herself.

“What are you doing here?” Emmelot demanded. “It’s exam week! Surely they shackle you all to the Academie grounds.”

“Family dinner last night. I slept over at home.”

“Well, don’t forget the strike—it might take you longer to get into the old city.” Emmelot’s hair was in four businesslike braids. It was a council-sitting day. She frowned down at Moyna. “You look a fright. Did you sleep at all?”

“Sleep is for summer,” Moyna said automatically. An unofficial motto at the Academie Sieuxerr.

“Here.” Emmelot nudged a tray in her direction. “Happy first day of sweetmice season. We’ll pretend Amaury’s not been making them for three weeks already.”

“Festival creep gets worse every year,” said Moyna, and took one.

Her first bite enclosed the two rock-sugar dots that served as the mouse’s eyes, and her teeth sank through buttery glazed bread to the sweet almond paste within.

Other flavours were optional; this one had the combination of orange zest and rosewater that only this bakery made.

“Not kidding about the strike,” said Emmelot. “It’ll be first on the agenda at council this morning. Get moving. And Mathé’s luck to you for the exams.”

Moyna bit back one truth—I don’t want it—and gave another instead. “I don’t need it.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Emmelot.

No more distractions. No more delays.

Moyna took her half-eaten mouse and her satchel and began to run again, this time not toward the past but the future. Toward the last barrier that stood between herself and the awful rest of her life.

There were half as many trams running as usual.

The artificers’ strike had been timed to begin during the week of Mathé’s Feast: the week of sweetmice, and candles, and paper lanterns bearing the sparks of the dead and the secrets of the living toward the stars.

And the Grand Exams in which the fifth-year scholars of the Academie Sieuxerr proved themselves adequately trained healers, ready to shed their grey scholars’ robes and don the blue.

Moyna spent the half-hour journey into the old city standing in a cram of annoyed, yawning, sweating bodies.

It was already warm enough to make the press of people unpleasant, even in Moyna’s sleeveless robe over lightweight chausses and chemise.

Magic hummed the tram along its tracks, keeping pace with carts and being overtaken by message-runners.

“And next week there’ll be no trams at all, I hear,” someone said, nearly against Moyna’s ear.

“We’d better hope the council reaches agreement with the guild this week, then,” their companion replied.

“Could have picked any time but a festival week, if you ask me. Bloody inconvenient.”

Someone else pointed out that this was in fact the point of a strike.

Someone else again was a leader for a trade guild, and chimed in heatedly.

Moyna mentally ran through the blood vessels of the arm, trying to keep hold of her brittle calm, until someone’s gesticulations caught their bracelet on the strap of her satchel, nearly hauling her off balance.

“Excuse me,” said Moyna, trying to extricate it.

A huff from the person thus addressed melted into a softer look when they saw Moyna’s purple belt and purple-edged robe.

They unhooked their bracelet and touched two fingers to the white woven headband of the genderfree that sat atop their cropped grey curls, then edged back to allow Moyna a few more inches of space.

This produced a wave of swaying and grumbling farther down the tram car.

“Fifth-year? Grand Exams this week, hey? Mathé’s luck to you, Healer.”

“Scholar,” corrected their companion. She was an elderly woman with the finely shivering lower lip of the early stages of the veil tremor; it might not progress any further, if she was getting treatment for it.

She looked at Moyna with no softness at all.

Everyone in earshot, which was unfortunately most of the car, was now looking at Moyna, and most of those looks were unfriendly.

“Will you be staying in Sieuxerr when you graduate, Scholar?” the woman asked. “Or taking your gifts elsewhere?”

It was a reasonable question for a healer on the verge of qualifying. It hit Moyna like a blow to the sternum. Rosewater stagnated on the back of her tongue.

“I’m going back to— I mean, I’ll be going to northern Camar.”

Back, as if she’d ever been.

“Ah, that’s where those looks are from. And I thought I heard a hint of an accent. Very musical voices, you Camarrans have. Proper larks.”

Lark might have been a common name for what Moyna was, but it wasn’t a kind one. Anthem larks built their nests in the habitats of other birds and grew up singing stolen songs, using their mimicry to encroach on territory and eventually crowd out the original residents.

It was also what people called any family that moved from one place to another in order to shape the form that their child’s potential magic would take. And especially a family who moved to Sieuxerr in order to produce a healer.

Moyna said nothing. She did not say: My parents speak Resée with Camarran accents, but I don’t. I have spent every day of my life in Sieuxerr. Someone else’s idea of home is lodged in me like glass in a wound.

“Cursed healers,” said someone farther down the tram car. “Drew the serrage to our doorstep and still half of them run off to be showered in gold elsewhere, instead of fixing their own bloody messes here.”

Ten years ago the serrage was a slow-moving flood, a contagious illness that passed through Sieuxerr in a matter of months—killing almost no one, yet leaving devastation behind.

A flattening, angering devastation, of aftereffects and dreadful lingering symptoms. It had decimated the workforce of healers far more than any others, given how many of them had been exposed to it in the clinics and hospitals, but that didn’t change the anger from the townies.

If anything, it seemed to make it worse.

Moyna had been in her early teens when it all happened, not yet mage-tested but already assuming she’d be a healer. That was what she’d been born for, after all. Anthem lark.

And then suddenly there were hundreds of healers who could no longer work, and thousands of people left with pain and spasms that wouldn’t settle, and—most angering and shaming of all, to the people of the Blue City—no satisfactory cure.

And so a career that Moyna was resigned to, but which at least came with respect, suddenly looked different. More work. Fewer healers to shoulder it. And far less respect, even from those who still flocked to seek care.

Aboard the tram there was an uneasy murmur of response. It was a common sentiment, expressed in far from the ugliest way Moyna had heard. But still, speaking it aloud on the first day of Mathé’s feast week wasn’t . . . mannerly.

Moyna said some more nothing. She checked the time. It was later than she’d thought, and her breath quickened. Much as she dreaded this week being over, she didn’t fancy the humiliation of missing her first exam case due to something as stupid as misjudging the trams.

The blue streets were cleaner, the buildings grander and with more room to breathe, as the tram left the outer suburbs and headed east through the quieter, richer quarter that abutted the Wall Park.

The people climbing aboard the tram at each stop had longer and more intricately braided hair, finer fabrics to their clothes, and expressions of greater annoyance to find themselves inconvenienced by the reduced tram numbers.