Four
The above diagram shows the physical arrangement of healers within the array.
A minimum of two healers is suggested for the radial supporting the healer in the Bone Integrity position.
An optional support radial is shown for the healer responsible for Microvive Eradication.
This may not be necessary, depending on the nature of the injury and the length of time between initial injury and performance of this healing.
—From the treatment plan “An open and comminuted fracture of the femur in an elderly woman” by Healer X. Edeline
Jehan had never intended to acquire a usual lunch spot with Ysabel Caudotte. It had happened by accident when he was trying to have sex with her.
They hadn’t even fucked, in the end. They’d been the last two lingering in the room after a tutorial, Ysabel telling him about a case report she’d read, animated and scathing in a way that Jehan had always liked, and . . . he’d offered.
Ysabel had given him a look as if he were a pair of boots she was thinking of buying. And then laughed and said no, but if he was free for an hour, she wouldn’t mind hearing more about what Dean Saige was like as a research supervisor. So they’d gone for lunch instead.
Jehan wasn’t about to tell his Grand Exam group that story. Even if he was tempted to present a version of it where he and Ysabel had a lot of sweaty, acrobatic sex, and it was fantastic, the best Jehan had ever had, and he’d probably been the best she’d ever had, et cetera.
Instead he said the depressingly true: “We met up from time to time. Talked about my research project, mostly. She found it interesting. And she was an effective whetstone for feeble ideas.” He smiled past a jolt of renewed, unexpected loss.
Ysabel hadn’t quite been a friend. He wasn’t sure if she did friends, beyond her deep attachment to Clement.
But someone so bright, so sharp—fuck, it was a loss. A waste.
“Well,” he said. “I guess I’m going out for lunch.”
Even reading the word had made his stomach shudder with hunger. His post-exam body was clamouring for him to catch up with the usual daily program of nutrients.
Estiene gave him a look. “And you’re expecting your date to show up?”
“What if the corpse wasn’t her after all?” said Jehan.
“It looked like her,” said Moyna.
Jehan’s mind was a tram still humming on exam tracks, looking for the differential diagnosis. “It could have been illusion.”
“Magic can’t fake how death feels,” said Estiene flatly.
“A very good illusion cast on a different dead body. There must be some freelance illusion-mages in Sieuxerr, we’re not that far from the Levoric states.”
“Or Ysabel is dead after all, and the letter could be a trap set by someone else,” said Alys.
“Someone else who knew what today’s case would be,” Moyna pointed out. “Including that we would have a patient with hare fever.”
“Fuck,” said Estiene, after a pause.
Indeed. The exact, unpleasant strangeness of that hadn’t registered with Jehan past the larger strangeness of receiving a letter from a dead person.
Now it struck him squarely. If Ysabel had written the note, then Ysabel had made an effort to find out the Grand Exam cases in advance.
He tried to make that fit with what he knew of her, and failed.
“Ysabel’s not—wasn’t a cheat,” he said. “She didn’t need to be.”
Estiene’s mouth gave a minute, anxious twitch. Probably none of the others noticed it happen. Jehan looked away. Estiene Marcelle’s feelings weren’t his problem; and he certainly had enough problems of his own to be getting on with.
“So maybe it is from someone else, pretending to be Ysabel,” said Alys. “Regardless, it’s the only clue we have. I’m coming to lunch. What about you, Clement?”
Nobody argued with the word clue being tossed like a small firework into the conversation. Instead, for what felt like the tenth time that morning, everyone looked at Clement.
Clement was rubbing their upper arm as if it ached.
They looked to have woken further from the slumber of shock, but they hadn’t seized on the hope that their best friend’s death was some sort of elaborate illusion-ridden prank.
Jehan had to admit it was unlikely. Ysabel might have spun merrily at the centre of her own priorities, but she’d never put Clement through something like that.
“Yes,” said Clement. “I’m coming.”
Alys smiled. “Estiene? Moyna?”
Fuck. There was no way to uninvite any one of them, was there?
And it wasn’t unusual for an exam group to go for a meal after their cases, because there was nobody else with whom the geas would let them obsessively chew over their performance.
Or, in this case, the business of Ysabel’s (probably) corpse and Ysabel’s (possibly?) note.
Estiene and Moyna exchanged a glance, hostile reflections of one another. Healers were trained to have an irrepressible instinct for mystery-solving. It was easy to see when that instinct overrode any other qualms.
“It’s not like I have anything else scheduled for today.” Moyna’s wide mouth and hooded eyes shifted from sarcastic to determined. “I didn’t know which time slot I’d be in. Unlike that messenger,” she added. “That’s another question. How did they know to come here, and now, to find Jehan?”
“Whoever lodged it at the messenger service could have left instruction to look for your name on the corkboard,” said Clement. “But an invitation to lunch only works if delivered before lunch. Which only three of the time slots are.”
Lunch, lunch! Jehan was starving. He declared that they were taking all the unanswered questions with them to lunch, and set off, leading the way, before anyone could argue.
It was only a ten-minute walk to the usual spot, a busy teahouse set between the Academie and the Hospital and frequented almost exclusively by healers.
After sunset it transformed into a drinking hole full of blue robes and black humour.
Right now, the sun was already high enough that the business of the city was clustered in the shade of the bridges and underpasses creating the chequered rise and fall of the bluestone streets in the old city.
Jehan’s mother once said that Old Sieuxerr looked like someone had taken it in both hands and squished inward, making everything buckle and fold onto itself.
Apart from the largest squares and the main thoroughfares from the old docks, the streets were small and prone to labyrinthine turns and rises, only smoothing out sensibly when you approached the riverside.
A table had been booked at the teahouse under Ysabel’s name. Jehan was unsurprised.
Three more chairs were crammed around the small table.
Alys ordered tea and pastries for them all.
She was prim and fresh as a rose petal, even wearing the same grey robe as the rest of them—her purple trim, like Estiene’s, was silk ribbon, and she had matching purple embroidery on her cuffs and a belt of dyed leather, unlike Jehan’s faded sash bought thirdhand from the uniform exchange.
And she produced another wondrous smile when the server wished them all Mathé’s luck for the exams.
Everyone knew what happened during the feast week, after all.
Their table was attracting looks and whispers from the rest of the teahouse’s patrons.
Two healers with the blue belts of hospital generalists and bleary fresh-off-the-night-shift expressions sat nearby, huddled over huge mugs.
One of them raised his in a toast when Jehan looked over, exhaustion giving way to a clear mixture of nostalgia and thank-Mathé-that’s-long-past.
Jehan ate three sweetmice from the first platter to hit the table, and ignored fucking Estiene’s fucking look of mind-your-manners reproach.
Alys was paying. She could afford it. Jehan didn’t even care for almond paste, really, but it was food and it was there.
And this was the last week of Mathé’s Feast that Jehan would experience in Sieuxerr for a while.
The dissolving nubs of sugar, the not-quite-unpleasant almond taste—they were fulfilling a kind of pre-emptive nostalgia.
And the tea was very good. Jehan knew from his language studies that there were three words for coffee in Fenehafen, but they borrowed the Resée word for tea. He wondered what that said about his prospects for beverages over the next three years.
By the time the second platter was brought, Clement had almost smiled at a story about six-year-old Alys causing a fire in her kitchen while trying to bake hazelnut biscuits, and Moyna and Estiene were arguing about whether they should have told the gendarmes about the note.
Jehan was waiting for the impossible. For Ysabel to walk in the door. If anyone could pull off a miracle like that, it was Ysabel Caudotte.
Time passed. Alys ordered carrot salad—oily and spiced in its bed of yogurt—and cold leek tart, and more tea. Jehan’s anticipation turned to tension turned to the feeling of walking into a room and finding it unexpectedly packed up into boxes. A sense of leaving. No. Of being left.
“Well,” Jehan said finally. He forced a laugh and then wished he hadn’t. “I don’t think she’s coming.”
“If that note was really from her at all,” Estiene said.
If this was some kind of trap, as Alys had suggested, then nobody else had shown up to the teahouse to spring it. Jehan slid the letter in front of Clement. “It looks like her hand to me, but you’d know best.”
Another uneasy pause. Alys tried to sip from her empty cup, and picked at her cuffs. Clement’s overbright eyes scanned the letter.
“It’s hers,” Clement said. “She always writes so fast she runs the middle of words together, and she has that little hook on the . . .” Their voice wavered and their face closed like a door. Jehan felt a surge of renewed sympathetic grief.