Two
Failure of the Grand Exam will result in repeating the fifth year in its entirety.
A scholar who has failed the Grand Exam a total of three times will be removed from the Academie.
This person will not hold the title of “Healer,” but rather that of “Unaccredited Healer,” and they may only perform a limited subset of healing techniques unless under the supervision of a qualified Healer.
Any bonded Academie fees will be repaid to the sponsor out of their own future earnings, and the location and manner of their work will be set by the Grand Duchy’s Committee for Healer Workforce for a time equal to twice their total years of study.
—From the Scholars’ Handbook of the Academie Sieuxerr
The strangest thing was the stillness. Every time Estiene had seen Ysabel Caudotte, seated at her usual library carrel or standing in a treatment array of healers in one of the theatres, some part of her was always in motion.
A toe tapping against the library floor.
The fingers of one hand twitching as if she wanted to lift them and do the entire healing herself.
Now . . . nothing. Not even the brown curling ends of her braids moved. There were no breezes in here to stir the air.
Ysabel lay on her front. One arm was bent awkwardly beneath her chest, in a way that would have you waking up with the hand numb and tingling, and her head was turned toward that arm.
Not quite staring at the door they’d entered through, but close.
Her gaze was half-lidded, clouded, and somehow demanding.
There was a dark pool of dried blood gluing her temple to the floor.
“What—what the fuck do we do?” said Moyna.
Her voice jolted Estiene into thought.
“Is this . . . perhaps this is the exam?” The idea flooded him gratefully. “A trauma case. An elaborate roleplay.”
“We’ve never . . .” Alys, trailing off almost at once. She looked up at the one-way curtain around the viewing gallery.
No, they’d never heard of anything like this. But Estiene wouldn’t ruin the first case of their Grand Exam, if this was in fact what it was, by failing to begin.
He strode forward and knelt at Ysabel’s head. He gathered his magic and refined it for diagnostics, letting it pool within him and thin out in readiness for the delicate, probing work.
That blood looked so very much like blood.
Estiene touched Ysabel’s cheek.
The flesh was firm and waxy. It was not cold, but neither was it warm; rather, it had the strange air-temperature of wooden furniture, cool only in comparison to Estiene’s own fingertips.
His magic flowed out before he could think to keep it back, and nausea rose instantly in Estiene’s gullet as he was filled with the shrieking discordant sense of how wrong everything was.
Death felt like this. Not just out of tune, but utterly unresponsive.
He could barely distinguish lifeless nerve from clotted blood vessel from dense, cold organ meat.
There was nothing to be rebalanced here. Nothing that could be dragged back toward normal. There was a threshold over which life could be daringly snatched, if you were clever and it had only just fled in particular ways. This body had passed that threshold long ago.
It seemed like an agonising age, but Estiene knew from experience that the sensation would have only lasted a second before he snatched his fingers back.
You weren’t supposed to use diagnostic magic on the thawed cadavers in first-year anatomy classes, but everyone did.
A senior scholar would dare you to try it.
And so you’d learn it felt like this. Nobody could stand it for more than a moment.
“She’s dead,” Estiene said.
His limbs felt odd. Far away. He even overbalanced, catching himself clumsily on one of the numb bone-pockets that were currently his hands, while Moyna took hold of the corpse that had been Ysabel Caudotte and rolled her onto her—its—back.
It didn’t even move like the unconscious body of a patient. Too stiff.
Moyna hissed out a sound. Her hands were flat on Ysabel’s chest. Ysabel wore the same grey-and-purple robe as the rest of them, the front now fallen open to show thin cream-coloured chausses beneath. There was no blood anywhere else as far as Estiene could see.
Jehan folded himself down onto his knees beside Moyna, and Alys knelt worriedly near Ysabel’s feet. All of them were crouched around the body now. All except one.
Estiene looked up and saw Clement Savoye’s face, and then wished he hadn’t.
There was no colour at all in Clement’s cheeks or lips. They were holding on to their own wrist as if groping for a pulse or bracing to haul themself out of the river by one of those rusted metal drowning-loops.
Their gaze met Estiene’s and he couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
Clement said, soft and grey as dust, “Ysabel?”—and moved forward and down to join them.
Estiene had the urge to move away from Ysabel’s head, as if Clement were the most senior healer present and they were about to begin a complex healing work. He stayed put. He’d taken that position out of instinct. There was no reason for him to move.
The floor was painfully hard under his knees.
Clement’s breathing sounded wrong. Estiene’s own temples throbbed. Talking to the loved ones of patients, when the prognosis was poor or too late, was the worst part of being a healer. And the Grand Exam was supposed to be clinical. It was unfair for this situation to be shoved in front of him now.
“Restart her heart?” Alys always ventured her thoughts like she wanted someone else to tell her the answer.
“Or—see if it feels like poison? There must be something we have to do, something . . . we can do . . . ?” She, too, touched the body and obviously sent her magic through it, queasily swaying back the next moment.
As if she didn’t trust that Estiene knew what death felt like, as if he hadn’t done it properly.
“How would you know?” he fired at Alys. “Didn’t you have to remediate in diagnostics? Twice?”
Alys went dark pink and her eyes dropped.
Estiene’s mind had begun to move again. He followed it in relief.
“Poison? No. You can tell just by looking that this”—the dried blood matted in Ysabel’s hair, and the sickening inward curve of the skull when Estiene wincingly felt across it—“was probably made by a direct blow, or a fall from a height. As high as the gallery, at least.”
The others all looked up. All except Jehan, whose light amber-brown eyes glared directly at Estiene. It was the kind of look that might accompany a slap or the rake of fingernails. Estiene’s cheek glowed as if Jehan had indeed leaned across the space and hit him.
“I know it’s a trial, Marcelle, but try to be less of a pustulant cock-sore for an hour, can’t you?” said Jehan.
Estiene wanted nothing better than to snarl back worse, no matter how many unseen examiners might be judging him on professional behaviour. He wiped flakes of blood off his fingers with a fold of his robe, trying to think.
The door beneath the clock opened. Finally, someone was coming to fix this. To sweep it away and tell them it had all been a terrible joke.
The person who came through the door wore a patient’s beige robe and held a piece of paper folded with a wax seal.
He was a middle-aged man, thin and wiry, with greying hair and a faint sheen of sweat on his brow.
He blinked at the group of them crouched around Ysabel’s body and said, in a wary whisper: “Is everything all right? Is that part of it . . . ?”
The inner door closed behind him. A hand on the clock above began to move in silent ticks. Nobody else could enter or exit the room now, and there would be no communication or help from the gallery. The artificer magic of the Rondelle ensured that.
No interruptions; no resets. Nothing could stop the Grand Exam until the hour was up.
And this man was their exam case, which meant that Ysabel Caudotte was not.
“One hour,” said Jehan. It was nearly a croak of dismay. “Savoye, you don’t have to take part. Leave it to the rest of us.”
“Seriously?” Moyna demanded. “With Caudotte just— What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Nobody can do anything about Caudotte until the hour’s up,” said Estiene. “And it’s the Grand Exam. Do you want us to fail?”
Moyna’s mouth turned into a firm line.
Clement gave an erratic movement of their head. Impossible to tell if it was a nod or a shake. A worm of pain tried to penetrate Estiene’s thoughts. What if he’d walked in and seen Marion lying there? Or his father? Or—
No. No time for that. They were healers, and part of the work was focusing your mind on the task in front of you, even when death was close enough to kiss. Or trip over.
Estiene stood up, took the paper from the patient, and broke the seal. “Thank you,” he said formally. “Please take a seat.”
“Wait,” said the patient, voice rising. “Is that girl— Is it safe here?”
“You’re safe,” said Estiene. He tried not to sound impatient. “Now—”
“Shouldn’t we call for help?”
“We can’t,” said Estiene. “Not until the hour’s up.”
“What’s your name?” Alys asked. She stepped to shield Ysabel’s body from the man’s view.
After a moment, he lowered himself gingerly into the chair.
“And I’m so sorry about the—um—we weren’t expecting it either, and I’m sure once the hour’s up someone will come and take care of it—we’ll just get on with things and do the best we can. ”
Amazingly, this platitude—or, more likely, Alys’s golden looks and breathtaking smile—got a hesitant smile in response from the patient.
“Girard,” he said. Answering the direct question only. He’d have been instructed to do that.
Estiene read aloud. “Ask questions of this patient to generate a differential diagnosis, then use magic to reach a single working diagnosis. Describe the possible courses of this patient’s condition and generate an initial treatment plan.”