Four #4
“Fuck.” Jehan gave up on thinking. His fingers were finally, finally in Estiene’s infuriating short hair, able to comb through it and caress it without having to endure the time and effort of undoing a series of braids.
A sharp jolt of pure lust took him by the balls as Estiene’s teeth worried at the tendons of his neck.
He should—say something. Return the jab.
He fumbled for the conversation, but he could only think of Estiene’s redeeming qualities—fuck, what was wrong with him—like Estiene’s hair, and the fact that his hips were bucking because Estiene’s hand knew exactly how to touch him, and if Jehan made a joke right now then Estiene would laugh, helpless and unfettered, a warm and inextricable burr against Jehan’s neck—
“I— Fuck. No.”
Sudden, unbalancing space. Estiene had said it, and Estiene stepped back.
And there were all those problems, the full list of them, rushing back in. They stuck in Jehan’s teeth. He sounded mean, and meant to, when he said: “What the fuck is your problem? You’re the one who ended things.”
It had a fraction more dignity than You dumped me. He and Estiene had a long history of one of them or the other ending things, then some time later starting them up again, often in a room like this one. But that last break, only a month ago, had felt excruciatingly, humiliatingly final.
Jehan couldn’t see Estiene’s face. Only hear his breath.
Estiene said, “Yes, I did. Yes.” A horrible pause. “Just then, I shouldn’t have— I’m sorry.”
Estiene must have reversed his actions, like following the path of someone else’s residual magic to see where in the body the healing had taken place, because now the stopper was back on the shelf and the door flung open, letting in the light, and Jehan felt like absolute shit.
He’d done this on purpose, he realised. Talking with or about his father always made Estiene suggestible: needy, and angry, and wanting somewhere to put that anger so that he didn’t have to admit its true target to himself.
Jehan knew that. And Jehan was having a strange and wearying day, and Ysabel was dead and they were not, and Jehan had wanted solace and solidity, wanted Estiene’s inconveniently beloved body in his arms, and so he’d made it happen. Also without admitting it to himself.
It was like that in a fight sometimes. You stood blinking down at your opponent, knuckles broken open and bright with blood, and only then realised that you’d seen an opening and exploited it faster than conscious thought.
“Come on,” he said. “I don’t want to miss Danisy’s planning statement.”
The staircase up to the theatres had a broad window down onto the free courtyard clinic, where shade-cloths had been raised over the waiting areas.
Of the H of the main building, Hospital Square sat between one set of arms and the clinic sat between the other.
Perpetually overextended and understaffed, the clinic was nevertheless the pride of the Hospital.
If you turned up, and waited, you would be seen and assessed and treated, eventually.
Mathé had refused care to no one and neither did the healers of Sieuxerr.
Word about this particular healing must have spread.
Grey-robed scholars clustered hopefully in the corridor.
Estiene walked past them as if they weren’t there and said, “We’re to observe.
Head Healer Marcelle’s given permission,” to the orderly at the door into the viewing gallery.
They were admitted to a chorus of annoyed groans from the scholars left behind.
They crammed together on the end of a bench.
Estiene’s leg was pressed up against Jehan’s, but Jehan managed to ignore it.
From the moment he’d first stepped onto the floor of one, nervous and thrilled in the green-belted robe of a first-year scholar, he’d loved the grand theatres which filled the top floor of the Hospital: their domed glass ceilings for full light, their hard glossy floors cloudy from years upon years of chalk, the grates leading to gutters to wash everything away.
And these surrounding rows of seats for observers.
Twenty years ago they’d run lotteries for the seats in the public section of the gallery, the demand was so high.
Ten years ago, at the height of the serrage, they’d closed the galleries entirely.
And nine years ago a group of protesters had quietly taken their seats at the first public healing in the reopened theatres, and then hurled rag-wicked bottles of burning spirits down amongst the healers, right at the danger point of the procedure, shouting about how the healers of Sieuxerr had called the serrage down upon their city through their hubris, and they deserved to suffer as the city was suffering.
Two healers had come close to dying—and had lived, because their fellows had turned to act upon them at once.
The patient had died.
Today Jehan could see only a handful of people in townie clothes among the blue and grey robes. The patient’s family, perhaps.
The patient herself was a visibly pregnant woman, belly domed under the beige robe, lying with a cushion under one hip, already asleep. She’d have been given a tonic for that. No magic was worked until the healing officially began.
It was what healers called a ten-body problem.
Ten healers stood on the floor of the theatre, each in place where the chalk dictated, within arm’s length of the person in front.
The array radiated out from three points of direct contact on the patient herself.
Most of the healers had the orange belts of interventionists, though there was a single black-belted theatre specialist and the uncommon burnt-umber belt of a specialist in diseases of childhood.
You wouldn’t see that shade outside the Hospital.
Nowhere else could afford to have healers specialise to such a granular level.
The patient herself, of course, was the problem. Standing at her head, taking the position of first healer in the array, was the Head of Complex Intervention.
Healer Busso Danisy was a fat man with darker skin than you usually saw in Rese, hair in a mass of twisting braids—famously, he was the youngest son of two equatorial plant-mages who’d uprooted their lives to seek treatment in Sieuxerr for one of his siblings, and stayed—and a deep, commanding voice.
He used it now to outline the plan for treatment, reading from statements by the senior specialists who’d be controlling each thread of the healing: holding the mother’s life steady, holding her mind beneath the surface of consciousness, and working directly upon the unborn child to fix the defect of the heart that had been identified during checkups.
The mother would be rich, Jehan thought. She probably saw a private healer who could afford the time to be thorough, and who’d referred her to the Hospital for this treatment.
The air in the theatre was taut and quiet with excitement when Danisy finished, and when each of the healers standing in the array had confirmed their understanding and their role.
“That’s fucking elegant,” Jehan breathed, standing a little to see the whole of the chalked-out pattern.
The array and the treatment plan would be pinned up on the theatre boards tomorrow for general comment and copying-down, if the healing was successful, but he wanted to set this firmly in his mind before the magic began. “Has this even been done before?”
“Maybe not, in the specifics,” said Estiene. “I’ve never read about it.”
They shared a brief look that held nothing but delight and envy of the healers on the floor, and then fell back into the rapt observing silence that the situation deserved.
This was where Jehan was supposed to be.
This was the work he loved. And Ysabel had loved it too; if she were alive she’d have been sitting here, Jehan had no doubt, learning everything, drinking it all up and taking it with her into her own full and brilliant career.
Danisy lifted a hand and sang a low crystalline note.
One by one the other healers joined in, some an octave above, until the music filled the space and Jehan felt it crisp on his cheeks like winter.
The healers held it, all bracing and attuning their magic in preparation, and then Danisy nodded and let his hand fall for silence.
There were thousands of people in the world who would never receive this sort of care.
Who would die of treatable fevers or watch their infants gasp and turn blue in their arms. There were never enough healers.
Never, never. Who would kill one? Who would dare to remove that from the world?
What personal dislike could ever be justification enough?
“Let’s begin,” Danisy said.