Three #2
“Tixerr— Ahum.” Quentin fumbled his pencil. He transparently located the next-prettiest face in the hope it would have a less-well-connected name attached. “Right. You?”
“Estiene. Marcelle.” Estiene radiated the outrage of an elderly aunt in the face of Quentin’s leering. Alys felt grubby herself. The robes were a signal. When you wore them, you were not supposed to be an available sexual being. You were a healer first and only.
The name Marcelle had an even worse effect on Quentin, whose face creased with a sneer.
Things deteriorated further when the gendarmes’ captain arrived.
He was a stocky, white-haired man with sharp eyes and gold buttons on his tunic, who looked in thoughtful silence at Ysabel’s body but showed no inclination to take over the situation.
His officers, spurred on by his presence, seemed determined to convey that they had better things to do with their time during the chaos of a festival week—with a major guild strike going on, no less!
—than hang around playing a silly-fool game of mimes, when it was clear that the healer had killed herself. As healers were known to do.
“Scholar,” said Moyna, overlapping with “Excuse me?” from Jehan.
Smirk, smirk. “Are you going to deny it?”
None of them could. The thought had been bobbing in Alys’s head even as she tried to push it down.
Every year you heard of a handful of cases.
Suicide among Academie scholars tended to happen in the fiendishly intense fourth year, no matter how much they were all warned against it—no matter how many talks the Chancellor gave about how they were precious, they were needed, they were the well-guarded and much-celebrated future of healing, a valuable gift given to the world.
It was a vast and tragic insult to the spirits and to Mathé to make a waste of oneself.
And yet.
Brodier looked as if she’d tasted something bitter.
“Caudotte never said anything to me, and I like to think I’d have— Well, I was working very closely with her.
Though I’ll be the first to admit,” the bitterness deepening, “that the pressure on people of our profession, to pretend that nothing is wrong and we are fully capable of shouldering every demand made on us, is . . . extreme. And Caudotte did have very high expectations of herself. I suppose it’s possible. ”
“You were working with her?” asked Balay, in a belated showing of professionalism.
“On her research project.” A small spark lit Brodier’s face.
“Caudotte is—was one of the most promising healers we’ve seen in years, and her project was almost complete.
Major, groundbreaking work. And as her supervisor—” She cut off, and the spark dimmed.
“Well. Perhaps another scholar might take on the remaining work, next year.”
As her supervisor, Brodier would have been able to accept some of the credit. So much for that.
“Caudotte’s been going on for over a year about this project,” said Jehan. “So big, so secret. But she wouldn’t drop a single hint about the topic.”
“No,” said Clement. Their voice sounded rusty. “No, she was waiting for it to be finished. She liked to surprise people.”
Alys swallowed a tiny, horrible giggle of irony.
“Can we know what the topic was?” Jehan asked Brodier. “Now that, well.”
“It was a new approach for echo headaches. Very promising in the theory. I really think it would have rewritten the standards for treatment. And yes, she insisted on waiting until it was perfect before she’d even let people know about it.
She was stuck on one last, troublesome element of the array—but surely that wouldn’t have—” Another glance at Ysabel’s body.
Quietly she added, “I suppose that sometimes it only takes a small thing.”
A vine of strange guilt had been at work in Alys since she first realised the dead body’s identity, and now it squeezed her chest hard.
Ysabel Caudotte, that unhappy, and hiding it that well?
Surely not. Ysabel had everything. Ysabel could look the rules in the eye and laugh at them, and break them, and everyone admired her for it instead of trying to tug her back into line.
Alys had envied Ysabel with a hot, suffocating envy that rippled and billowed and sometimes felt uncomfortably close to hate.
And now she was dead.
“Perhaps she was desperate to work on this very important project and—what do you people call it? Burned out,” said Quentin.
They all looked at Ysabel. That blood-matted hair.
Alys shivered and touched her embroidery again.
Burnout happened when a healer’s magic was caught in a loop between intention and action, cause and effect, and the healer lost control of it and died of their own magic.
It was more likely to happen if you were practising a technique on yourself, which was considered unsafe for anything more complicated than minor wounds, but it could happen with patients as well.
Burnout was another popular subject for the Chancellor’s speeches, along with gory details of what it could look like: anything from a burst aneurysm, to being throttled by your own airways, to a ruptured gut.
There was one horrifying case of a healer’s legs both spontaneously ripping off above the knee.
A fractured skull? Well, why not?
“Seems simple enough,” said Quentin. “She was either practising on her own and burned out, or she decided to take a dive from the balcony. We all know the death of a healer is a sad waste of city resources,” with enough sarcasm that Alys glared at him, “but she’d probably just take her training somewhere else, anyway. Isn’t that right, sir?”
“Ysabel didn’t have echo headaches herself,” said Clement. “Who would she have been practising on? And why here? And,” faltering, as everyone’s attention turned to them, “she wouldn’t have killed herself.”
The pain there was so stark Alys winced.
“You think she was murdered?” said Quentin. “All right then. Why would anyone have killed this amazing young healer?”