Three
Serrage comes from the Old Resée word meaning “to tighten or squeeze,” due to the most common lingering symptom of painful, intractable muscle spasms. Interestingly, the same word lies at the root of the river’s name, and therefore the city’s name.
Sieuxerr, which lost its hyphen in the mists of time, was corrupted from a phrase loosely meaning “the squeezed gentleman,” referring to the narrow path of the river where it squeezes through the high banks at the southern tip of the city.
—From “Ten Years On: A Look Back at the Serrage,” in a long supplemental edition of the Sieuxerr Gazette
They stayed in the exam room while they waited. They stayed with Ysabel. Alys wished someone had thought to bring in a glass of water for Clement, or that she’d thought to suggest it herself, but everything had happened in rather a rush.
As soon as the bell pealed with the end of the exam, the silencing spell on the viewing gallery ended too. A voice had called urgently down to them not to panic, just to stay put, they’d send for the gendarmes at once.
“That’s Brodier,” said Estiene. He touched the short ends of his hair, yet again.
There were descending footsteps and then the door beneath the clock spilled out a wild-eyed Mathilde Brodier.
The Dean of Assessment herself must have been one of their two assigned examiners.
She was a tall woman who gave the impression of having been born with that harried expression stamped onto her face, and who wore her fair braids pinned up in a crown that ringed her head: a style commonly worn in the feast week, a nod to Mathé’s gender without adopting it fully.
On her heels was the other examiner, a youngish healer with the red belt of a trauma specialist over his stone-blue robe.
He hurried to gather up Girard and lead him away.
Alys gave the butcher a final wave of apology as he left.
Even with some symptom relief between each of the six rounds, it would be a long day for someone in the grips of a phantome fever, constantly being questioned and diagnosed.
And he’d had to endure the first hour of it next to a dead body.
Girard wouldn’t have volunteered to be an exam case.
Simply by turning up to the Hospital Sieuxerr’s clinics you were agreeing to be used in whatever way your treating team saw fit, if it advanced the education of scholars and healers.
Most people would agree that it was a small price to pay for being treated, for free, by the best healers in the world.
“I can’t believe it,” Dean Brodier was saying.
“I just can’t believe it. Of all the scholars, why—I just can’t—” She stared at Ysabel.
The sense of helplessness had been dreadful down here in the room, and must have been equally so for Brodier.
Examiners entered at the same time as the patient case, from a higher door leading onto the viewing gallery, so they’d have seen Ysabel exactly when Girard did.
“Dean Brodier,” said Alys. “Of course we want to help the gendarmes in any way we can, but—how can we say anything, around the proctor geas?”
“Oh, shit,” said Jehan, who’d sprawled lankily in the patient chair. He gave a little splutter of a laugh. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“I don’t know,” said Brodier. “We’ll just have to see what they say.
And we can’t use this chamber for the rest of the day, obviously—I’ve asked Healer Hilaret to fetch the Secretary— Oh, Denise, there you are,” as the Academie Secretary bustled through the door wielding a notebook.
She flinched at the sight of Ysabel, and she and Brodier fell into a huddle of logistical discussion.
The next group assigned to Chamber Two would need to be moved to an extra time slot that evening, couldn’t be helped, and all the Chamber Two groups would need to do their exam case somewhere else that day—the Academie’s Teaching Theatre, perhaps, where the spellwork for last week’s fourth-year practicum exams could be hastily tweaked by the artificers?
Yes. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do.
Alys chewed her nail, caught herself doing it, and moved on to soothing herself by touching the embroidered flowers done in parfunda purple that adorned the cuffs of her chemise.
“Dean Brodier,” said Estiene, once the Secretary had departed again. “Will we be given special consideration in our performance grades for this case?”
“You’re a true paragon of empathy, Marcelle,” said Moyna.
“It’s a reasonable question,” Estiene said snippily. He jerked his head at Clement, who was now seated cross-legged on the floor and had taken one of Ysabel’s dead hands in their own.
“It . . . will be taken into consideration,” said Brodier.
It was, Alys couldn’t help thinking, a tad hypocritical of Moyna Apprice to be accusing other people of lacking empathy.
Only last year, Jehan and Moyna had made a rather crude joke at Alys’s expense in a tutorial, clearly assuming the meaning of it had sailed over her head.
She hadn’t let her understanding show; she was that much her mother’s daughter, at least. But she’d felt the thistle-prick of reminder that no matter how hard Alys tried, she always left these gaps of oddness, of weakness, where other people could insert their assumptions.
She hadn’t even looked up, at the time.
But she hadn’t forgotten it.
Silence dripped in as they waited. Alys tried to distract herself by recalling the intricate storyline from the Theatre Splendid’s last season of serial plays, but her mind insisted on twanging between Ysabel’s death and the exam case.
She’d been no use at all. She’d never even heard of hare fever.
She’d studied plenty of phantomes, but clearly she could have done more.
No matter how much you did, at the Academie, there was always someone prepared to do more.
Case in point: Estiene, now leaning against the wall, almost scarecrow-like with the straightness of his spine and that fascinatingly short new haircut.
Alys wondered what his formidable grandmother had said about that.
She quailed to think of her own mother’s reaction if she’d cut her hair that short or worn it that loose.
It was a style you’d only started to see in the last few years, and only on daring young people who didn’t care how untidy and improper they looked in the eyes of their elders.
On Estiene, with his correct posture and his expensively gem-studded ears, it looked outright suggestive, as if he’d been caught halfway through undressing.
The two braids keeping the inky sway of hair out of his face were simple and small—they could have been done by a lover, never meant to be seen by anyone else.
Estiene had been touching the ends of his hair all through the exam and Alys was almost certain he didn’t know he was doing it.
Alys knew, because she liked watching people. It was a habit born first of bafflement, when she was much younger, and kept because it was a valuable skill for a healer. People interested her. They were an unfailing source of things to notice.
So while Alys didn’t much care for either Moyna or Jehan, she knew that Moyna only smiled in the self-defence ring and never, ever in class. She knew that Jehan had slept with half their cohort over the past five years and, somehow, most of those people still liked him.
And she’d known Estiene since they were young enough to be seated at the end of the table at formal dinners.
She knew more about him than she suspected he wanted her to.
Certainly she knew that he and Jehan had, over the five years of their studies at the Academie, been tediously strange about one another.
She was realising now that she knew very little about Clement Savoye.
They’d exchanged the occasional nod in the corridors of the Hospital, or a silently proffered plate of wafer-cake in the break after choir rehearsal; that was all.
Right now, Clement had that knocked-clean look that you saw in people sitting outside hospital rooms, when the tremble of waiting gave way to the dreadful exhaustion of certainty.
They sat with their eyes closed, dark brows angling spikily toward one another at the inner edges: a small and captivating unruliness above a long neat nose and a mouth with a tiny dark mole at one corner, where it might vanish into a dimple if they smiled.
Just as Alys had definitely, certainly gathered her nerve to go over and offer Clement a word of proper sympathy, the gendarmes arrived.
There were two of them to begin with. Both were men, neither over thirty, clad in dark maroon uniform tunics over smocks and chausses, with the coat of arms of the Grand Duchy on one breast. Gendarme Balay wore his hair just long enough to tuck untidily behind his ears, and gave the strong impression that he’d been woken from a nap and was dying to get back to it.
Gendarme Quentin had a yellowish stain on the cuff of his smock and what seemed to be a permanent smirk.
Neither of them, it became rapidly apparent, were pleased to be there.
They rolled their eyes when told about the proctor geas— “So anyone who’s laid eyes on the body can’t tell us anything?
” Balay demanded. “Not even to write it down? This shouldn’t take long, then.
” What a pity dripped sarcastically from his entire manner.
“Maybe you could gather whatever information you can, and decide on the best course of action after that,” said Brodier, who was obviously clinging to her politeness with both hands. “If nothing else, the geas will wear off in four days’ time, and we will all be able to speak freely then.”
Quentin long-sufferingly agreed to take their names. “Let’s start with you, sweetheart,” he said. His gaze took its time over Alys’s body before returning to her face.
“Of course,” she said. “Alys Tixerrant.”