Five #3
But they didn’t want to be. They had to remember, if only so they didn’t slip back into habits like this.
Mathé’s spark—they’d not been stressed enough to put their fingers in the fire for years.
The first time it happened, in first year, they’d been still too uneasy in their body to try to heal the damage themself.
So they’d gone to Ysabel. She’d healed the burn, and she’d hugged Clement tightly until they both stopped trembling.
Clement breathed for a while and then relit the candle. Just a candle, this time.
They closed the door of the room and locked it, then closed the window and pulled the curtain, then checked the door was truly locked by rattling the handle twice.
They sat sideways on Ysabel’s bed with their back to the wall, pulling their knees up to their chest and dragging the uppermost pillow into their lap. The pillow had a single strand of brown, curling hair on it, which Clement brushed aside.
They went and checked the lock again, and then sat back down.
It’s fine. Nobody can walk in. Nobody will hear.
Or—Ysabel’s voice now—somebody might hear, and that’d be fine too. People are allowed to make noise. You are allowed to take up space in the world, Clement.
The dark, writhing thing finally crawled up Clement’s chest and they sobbed into Ysabel’s pillow, with the force of a spring storm, until the candle was beginning to smoke and spit.
They were congested and muzzy and their back ached, when they were done, but it meant that they were firmly back in their flesh. It helped.
And now, the most difficult thing.
Ysabel’s mothers lived in a northern quarter of the city. It was an easy tram ride from the Hospital, which had been convenient when both of them worked there. Now Tiphaine did private house calls all over Sieuxerr and Adala didn’t work at all.
The trams were crowded. Half strike. The evening sun had found a gorgeous shade of gold with which to gild the grey buildings, the darker grey roofs, the blue streets of the Blue City of Sieuxerr, and the citizens who crowded those streets.
Clement braced themself against a new onslaught of looks and whispers.
At least these ones were impersonal, and so easier to handle.
The looks were directed at the grey robe: Clement-the-scholar, not Clement the person.
Scholars and healers weren’t allowed in public without their robes, so that townies could identify them instantly and there could be no possible excuse for harming them.
When Clement was young, not even the Ferue would have dreamed of laying a hand on a healer, for all that they muttered about the hubris of altering the flesh. Healers were sacrosanct. The legal penalties were severe and the social penalties worse.
But times had changed.
Clement paused on the front step of the Caudotte house, closing their hands into fists, releasing them, repeating it. This will be awful. And it will probably keep on being awful. But it will only be the first day of Ysabel’s death once. You only have to do this particular thing once.
For the first time they felt a thawing of gratitude toward the gendarmes, whose job it had been to deliver the news in the first place. Also for the first time, they imagined being in one of the other exam groups, and getting the news thirdhand.
Clement breathed. They rapped their knuckles on the door as a signal and went into the house, where Tiphaine met them in the front hall.
Tiphaine had removed her healer’s robe and thrown a house-gown over her chemise and chausses, and her face was puffed and pink with crying.
She looked both younger and decades older.
The house had the chamomile-and-orange scent of Adala’s favourite tea, as if she’d brewed so many pots today it had seeped into the walls.
Tiphaine looked at Clement and her expression broke.
Fuck fuck fuck. Clement had already cried all they were going to, but for a long moment their throat tried to close and they wanted to leave their body again—to drift elsewhere and stay. They bit their cheek, hard.
“Oh, Clement,” said Tiphaine thickly, and rushed forward and took Clement in her arms.
Twenty minutes later the three of them were in a tight cluster in the living room, Clement on their favourite chair while Adala’s legs stretched across the settee into her wife’s lap, her bony face relaxing in increments as Tiphaine sent magic through her painfully cramping calves.
Clement offered to help. Adala swiftly said, “No—save your energy for the exam.” Unlike her grief-altered wife, Adala looked the same as she always did on bad days.
Pain had only so many patterns, no matter its source—and Adala had more bad days than good.
She was drained of colour and vitality, and the sewn fabric pouch of barley-grains which she clutched to distract herself from the worst muscle spasms was close by and wrinkled with use.
She put a shaking hand on Tiphaine’s and added, “That’s enough for now. You should be saving yours too.”
“I did,” said Tiphaine. Despite her mild manner, Tiphaine had that banked fire of stubbornness which Ysabel had inherited along with the thick brown hair and the musical laugh. Clement found themself thinking unexpectedly of Alys Tixerrant. “I saved it for this.”
Ysabel once said that the serrage had, among its many other unfairnesses and cruelties, struck down the wrong one of her mothers. Tiphaine was sweet-natured and given to homemaking and would have been, if not a perfect invalid, at least a patient one.
Adala was not. Adala was short-tempered and naturally busy, happiest when charging from one project to the next.
She’d stepped in immediately to work long hours at the courtyard clinic when the serrage was still just an unusual phantome which nobody had seen before.
She’d been one of the first healers to catch it.
And then one of the earliest case studies—she’d written it up herself—of the severe aftereffects, the echo symptoms which seemed tailored to be a specific form of torture to someone as active and restless as Adala Caudotte.