Five #2
The man turned. He had deep-set brown eyes, full lips, and a broad nose set with the gold piercing of a Collegiate artificer mage. Probably he’d been rechecking the spells for tomorrow.
“Could you possibly let me in for a few minutes while I look? Unless”—shit, was Clement shoving at a picket line?—“you’re off now because of the strike?”
Those lips spread, slowly, into a smile that looked as if it were surprised to be there.
“Only half strike this week,” he said. “And those of us employed by the Academie are keeping hours as usual, with the guild’s blessing. Can’t have anything get in the way of the Grand Exam, can we?” he added, with a hint of dry spite. “Which room was it you wanted to look in, Scholar?”
“Chamber Two,” said Clement, “but if there’s a door to the internal staircase, that’d be better. I want to look in the examiners’ gallery.”
He sharpened. “Is that right.”
Clement’s instincts for people were only good in some areas, but one of them was in sensing a shift toward anger or suspicion. There was a thin boiling of stormcloud crossing the horizon here.
“My best friend is—was—the scholar who died last night,” they said quickly. “Did you hear about that, Artificer . . . ?”
“Decroy. Yes, I did hear.”
“Savoye,” said Clement in return. “Truthfully, I’m looking for something of hers. Not mine. You’re welcome to come in with me, and you can tell anyone you want that I came looking. It’s not a secret.”
The stormclouds settled. Decroy led them around the Rondelle to a slender door set between two chamber entrances, which, when unlocked, revealed a low-ceilinged corridor lit by artificer-lamps running straight into the centre of the building.
A round room was furnished with chairs and tables with water-jugs, and doors circled the wall leading out into the exam rooms. This would be where Girard and the other patients had waited.
In the very centre was a spiral staircase, which led up to another circular room ringed with numbered doors. Clement and Decroy went through the upper door marked 2.
The gallery was a V-shape reaching out from the door, and from this side the one-way curtain looked insubstantial as mist. Still, Clement pushed the curtain aside a little way and gazed down. There was no stain left on the floor. No dark patch where the blood had been.
The space and quiet up here were startling.
As was the sense of authority, of power, staring down at that triangular space.
Coming here to practice was exactly what Ysabel might have done.
She’d have enjoyed putting herself in the examiners’ shoes, imagining the day when she would be called on to judge fifth-year scholars in turn.
Clement crowded up close until their toes touched the wood of the barrier, and shifted their weight back and forth within their boots. The barrier’s top pressed into their waist through the fabric of their purple belt.
Ysabel had been of a similar height to them. If startled, if dizzy, if lost in a difficult self-directed healing—could she have toppled over? It was possible. To land where she did, she would have to have been standing . . . there. A little way down the left arm of the gallery.
Clement turned away from the barrier and searched the entire gallery. Golden evening light spilled down from the skylights. The shadows were deep but there was nowhere for things to hide, really, and Ysabel’s notebook wasn’t there.
Decroy hadn’t spoken once, and didn’t speak as they descended and left via the same corridor. He cleared his throat as he locked the external door. The wind was even stronger now.
“Sorry about your friend, Scholar. Took a leap rather than sit the exam, I heard?”
“She didn’t,” Clement said. They couldn’t keep it in. “She was killed.”
Decroy’s expression sharpened again. “Is that right,” he said. “And how are you so certain?”
“Because I know her. Knew her,” said Clement. “Thank you for letting me in, Artificer Decroy. Mathé’s joy to you in the week of their feast.”
It was time for the next stop. Always start with the difficult task you least want to do, Ysabel would have said, and work your way down to the easy stuff.
None of this was easy. And Clement was doing it in the exact wrong order, but that was fine. Ysabel was far better at telling you the right thing to do than doing it herself, sometimes.
So. The second-most-difficult task.
The fifth-year residence hall was near the edge of the Academie, half swallowed by the encroaching buildings of the city.
Nobody monitored fifth-year scholars when they weren’t at the Hospital, beyond ensuring they showed up to language classes and self-defence classes and chorale—all of which were mandatory through all five years.
Fifth-years were given the courtesy of pretending that they had some control over their lives.
Ysabel’s room was several doors down from Clement’s, on the same floor of the same wing. Clement had a spare key to that, too. It was against the rules to have spares cut and shared, but Ysabel—what had Jehan said? She didn’t much believe in limits.
This room took longer to search. Clement was methodical.
Ysabel did like secrets, even though she preferred to keep them inside her own skull than put them down on paper.
The notebook was the only physical thing of hers that she kept from Clement, and Clement would no sooner have cracked it open, while Ysabel lived, than stabbed themself in the hand.
The bed was neatly made, the hand-crocheted blanket in its unstylish riot of colours—a gift from Ysabel’s late grandmother, the year Ysabel began at the Academie—folded in a pile at its foot. It was too hot for blankets, but Ysabel would sleep with it stubbornly next to her feet until autumn fell.
No. She wouldn’t, now.
Wardrobe. Desk—mostly used as a dresser, as Ysabel preferred the library.
The small bookshelf packed with the detritus of life, boxed up every year and lovingly dragged from hall to hall on moving day.
Scholars of the Academie made their home at the Academie, even though all of them came from homes that were in some cases a mere stone’s throw from campus.
The moment you tested as a mage of the Blue City you no longer belonged to your family, or even fully to yourself.
The notebook was nowhere in Ysabel’s room either.
There was still an hour of good daylight left, but Clement paused at the sight of a candle on the dresser, only slightly melted down in its holder.
They found a box of matches and lit it, and exhaled slowly at the sight of the flame.
That was proper. In death the spark of a person left their flesh and joined the spark of all the dead, which lived in every flame.
A candle was a small memorial for Ysabel but it would do for now. Lantern Night was only three days away.
Something shifted painfully, deep inside Clement’s chest. The flame soared, agile and thin on a poorly trimmed wick, a fragile cone of orange heat.
Clement passed their fingers through the flame, then slower, and slower. The heat was a desperate cord thrown down to that shifting thing, and—holding their fingers quite motionless now—the more it hurt, the deeper it went—
Clement snatched their hand back and came hurtling back into their own body, sudden and hard as if they’d fallen from the chair.
Their breath came in deep wet gasps as they blew the candle out.
The skin of their fingers was already starting to blister and the pain was intense.
Fuck, fuck. Mathé’s own bones, fuck. How hadn’t they realised just how far from themself they’d been, how far they’d been knocked askew by the sight of Ysabel’s body that morning?
Like the feet of patients with stone-shoe disease, where the nerves shrivelled up and they could have half their toes rotting off without realising.
Clement had been walking around foreign to themself.
All day. Having conversations like everything was normal—perhaps the anger had allowed that.
But someone could have taken a brick to their skull, smashed it like Ysabel’s was smashed, and they might not have noticed.
Clement’s grief had been a stifling fog.
Now, fully inhabiting the body whose entire job it was to feel things, it was excruciating.
The sting in their fingers was nothing beside it.
Now the details of Ysabel’s room clamoured at their senses: the warm air smelling of ink and dust and rosewater, the hollow flute of the wind forced through an inch of raised window, the smudges on the mirror.
All of it empty. Ysabel would not be returning here. Ysabel was dead.
It hurt like being wrenched in half.
Clement looked at their blistered fingers.
A retch of history rose in their throat.
They gathered their magic and sent it into the blisters, tasting the familiar smoke and bitterness of recent burn damage.
Healing a burn was a slow trill between two notes, dissipating hungry heat into the air.
Once the gap between the notes collapsed entirely, you could take hold of the body and coax it back toward normal.
The burns on their fingers were fresh and responded nicely. Clement was young and healthy and their body was eager to be intact. Clement was left with smarting fresh pink skin.
As Clement had known it would, the magic sensed an echo elsewhere in their body. Tendrils of it found the scarred flesh and irregular skin of Clement’s upper arms, as if to say: Here, too?
But that was old and deep damage, something that had been inflicted on Clement long ago as ritual: a reminder of the flesh’s irrelevance.
Healing it would take more power and skill than Clement had.
If they wanted, they could have walked into the Hospital’s injury ward, or gone to a private aesthetics specialist. With time and effort and money they could be unmarked by their past.