Two #3
Moyna Apprice was a good healer. Very good.
Someone had made a bad joke in second year, when she and Estiene had come second and third to Ysabel’s first in the end-of-year exams, about Healer Marcelle perhaps having more children than he’d admitted to.
Ha, ha. Because Estiene and Moyna were both short and black-haired and gifted and .
. . not all that adept at making friends.
But Moyna’s hair was wavy to his straight, her Camarran skin a shade lighter than Estiene’s own mid-brown, and no matter how high her academic ranking, she was contracted to become a generalist healer a long way from here.
Estiene’s future lay in Sieuxerr and the Hospital. Everyone knew that.
“Do you have an idea, Apprice?” Estiene prodded.
“No,” she said; distracted, not looking away from Ysabel. “I thought I might have something, but—it doesn’t fit.”
“Girard,” Jehan said suddenly. “You said you own a butcher’s shop in the Eleventh Quarter. Do you ever work with small game? Rabbits or hares?”
It was the right question. Estiene saw it in the way Girard’s posture relaxed. He wouldn’t have been sent into the room as a Grand Exam case if a healer hadn’t already determined the answers to all the questions on the paper. He knew what they should be asking, even if he’d never volunteer it.
“Yes, both,” Girard said. “We get them in to order, when there’s demand for it.”
“What are you thinking?” Alys asked Jehan.
“Hare fever,” said Jehan. That itch in Estiene’s mind turned to a nudge of recognition.
“It’s a phantome, and very rare. I saw a case in the courtyard clinic once, and even the supervising healer took a while to recognise it.
It’s more common in hunters and farmers, and more common in summer.
I looked up the case studies afterward. It gives this pattern of a pain that moves around the joints. ”
“There’d have been demand for hares in the last week,” said Alys.
Yes. Spiced hare stew appeared on the tables of the rich on the first night of Mathé’s Feast. Estiene expected he’d eat some tonight, in fact. Or at least be served it. He might not have much appetite for it after this.
Jehan reeled off the usual course of the acute illness—not fatal, but you’d be feeling rotten for a week—and the aftereffects, which sounded dreadful.
A one-in-four chance of an echo-illness lasting for as long as a year, with the main symptom being ongoing intermittent pain in any of the joints initially affected.
That rang some more internal bells. Estiene had read about hare fever, probably late into one leaden-eyed night in the last month, dragging himself through obscure texts after a day spent on the wards laying his fingers on case after case after case.
Clement gathered themself to give a reasonable list of symptom management options.
Jehan, whose mother was a senior hospital medic, chimed in with some more: herbal tonics, heat treatment, massage.
Many of them nothing to do with healing magic at all.
Girard, who’d looked alarmed during the discussion about lingering pain, started to look more relieved at this vision of his future treatment.
As a diagnostics case, who could be reused through all six time slots, he’d have to sit through this several more times today.
“What a depressing case to start the Grand Exam with,” muttered Estiene. He was hot with the knowledge that Jehan, of all people, had thoroughly outperformed him. “I hate the ones we can’t cure with magic.”
Jehan turned on him. “Perhaps you’d prefer to work in a pristine healing bubble, Marcelle, and pretend medics and nurses contribute nothing, but if you—”
“Oh, trying to please Mama, are we?” Estiene snapped. Fuck. Why did Jehan have to be in his exam group? Estiene was perfectly capable of being professional under normal circumstances.
Jehan laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh.
“Would you two please shut up,” said Clement. They were seated beside Ysabel again. Strain showed in their expression as they nodded at Jehan. “That was a good pickup, Fortier. I don’t know how many of the other groups will have got this one.”
“They couldn’t expect to dig out enough cases of hare fever for every chamber,” said Estiene. “The others probably have a similar but less obscure phantome.”
“There might have been an outbreak,” said Moyna.
“Well, either way,” said Alys. “Now none of us will ever miss hare fever if we see it, will we? Girard, do you mind if I—?”
Girard made a go-ahead motion and Alys, followed by the others in turn, used the remaining time to learn how hare fever felt to diagnostic magic.
It wasn’t part of the exam. But they’d answered all the questions—they’d have passed the case—and as the clock ticked down, the presence of Ysabel’s corpse in the room loomed larger and larger.
The exam case had been a surreal and necessary break in reality.
This room, and this tragedy, was about to be flung open to let in the rest of the world.
Estiene insisted on taking another turn with Girard himself.
It was the best way to learn: to be told the answer first and then study the patterns and tastes of an illness.
He took a long time about it, and finally he caught something distinct in the backwash: a flare of heat on the edge of his tongue, as if he’d downed a bowl of Galucean hotsoup at the markets and then, hours later, caught a piece of pepper-shell as it escaped from between his teeth.
He lifted his fingers away.
The bell rang, golden and final, and the hour was up.