Two #2
The others were all standing now. Estiene and his exam group shared a disorganised glance.
Under normal circumstances, the handful of minutes before the patient entered was when they would have worked out a strategy between them.
Agreed upon who would start the history, ensured they were aware of one another’s strengths. Focused.
Instead they had a corpse, a distracted patient case, one scholar who couldn’t be expected to think clearly past their shock and grief, and a general air of disarray.
But it was Clement who spoke first, after all.
“Girard. Why don’t you tell us about what first led you to seek out a healer?”
They were away. General malaise for over a week, with fevers and headache, and a strange symptom of a migrating joint pain with no associated redness or swelling.
Clement got out the basics and handed off to Estiene, who had to force himself to pause after a while and gesture an invitation at Moyna.
By the time they got to Jehan and Alys, there wasn’t a lot left to ask, though Jehan remembered to ask about recent travel.
Alys, as her main contribution, gifted Girard with another of her smiles.
They agreed that an acute phantome of some kind was more likely than a microvive, and that farther down the list would be a new rheumatism, or one of those odd illnesses that sometimes accompanied tumours.
“Have any of you seen this sort of joint pain with influenza?” Jehan said. “You can get almost anything with that.”
“They wouldn’t give us influenza for the Grand Exam,” said Estiene irritably.
He had the annoying itch in the back of his mind that meant he’d read something once and it hadn’t sunk in.
Migrating joint pain. He should know this.
History was often more useful than magic, with diffuse phantomes—but they also had to come up with a treatment plan, and unless there was something in a recent journal—the exams could draw on any studies or arrays published up to the end of last term, maybe Estiene had missed one—
“Let’s move on. Diagnostics?” said Moyna.
She was looking at Estiene; most of them were. Estiene’s face heated. Advanced diagnostics was a prestigious specialty. It had been his father’s specialty, before Jourdain Marcelle became the Head Healer of the Hospital Sieuxerr. Estiene had never made any secret of his desire to follow suit.
With Ysabel Caudotte dead, a lot of people would now expect to see Estiene graduate as Dux Scolaris, with the highest rank in their cohort.
Before last week, he’d have agreed with them.
No—he still expected it. Before last week he’d have agreed that he deserved it.
Girard was shivering in his robe and rubbing at the knee that was, he’d said, currently paining him. He let his hands fall to his lap as Estiene approached the chair.
Estiene gathered his magic for the second time that hour. His fingers didn’t want to make contact with Girard’s temples. It was like the instinct that caught you back from touching a hot stove. He dreaded feeling that hideous wash of wrongness again.
This patient is not dead, he told himself.
And then, a flare of spite: No matter what my father thinks, I know how to do this.
He let his fingers fall to skin, completing the loop.
Through flesh, through bone, down to the feet and back up—that usual moment of hesitance before his magic found the tides of breath and the jump-rope rhythm of the heart and stepped into sync with them, a process that had been effortful in first year, layered with the fear of accidentally altering the body-state instead of simply assessing it, but now was second nature.
So. The initial sense, taken as a whole? A baseline of inflammation. Everything tuned to a higher pitch, a quicker drum.
Estiene pushed out thin threads of magic with more deliberation.
The thrumming heat of the knee was obvious.
A careful survey of the other joints showed up more heat, subtler, in the small joints of the left hand.
He returned to the knee and pushed, magic flooding tendons and cartilage and bone.
There was no sign of the sour, wallowing, gnawed-edge feeling that would indicate a microvivial joint with a collection of pus.
Sometimes with local phantomes you could catch them because of that lack: a negative space, like blinking darkness after looking at light. But there was nothing like that in the joints, nor—as Estiene’s magic tracked carefully up the spine and danced across Girard’s brain tissue—in the aching head.
He released contact.
“Definitely feels like a phantome,” he said. “Diffuse, with concentration in the joints. It could be influenza after all, but”—realising it as he said it, with a mean little pleasure at proving Jehan wrong—“there’s no inflammation in the muscles at all. There’s always muscle involvement with flu.”
“Let me feel the joints,” said Jehan, all but elbowing Estiene aside. His untidy braid swung into Estiene’s face, smelling of lemons and river water. Estiene found himself touching the fresh-cut ends of his own hair as Jehan took his turn at diagnostics.
“What if—” said Moyna.
“Yes?” said Alys, after a pause in which Estiene looked at the clock. Plenty of time yet, but they hadn’t even come up with a working diagnosis.
The pause continued. Moyna fiddled with the free end of her purple belt and glanced at Ysabel’s body, reminding Estiene of its existence with a nasty jolt. He’d been so swaddled in concentration that he’d stopped seeing the dead body on the ground.