Six
Alys, may I bother you a moment?”
“Come in, Mama,” Alys said, setting down her perfume bottle. Her mother was already halfway across the room, her reflection sweeping up behind Alys’s in the mirror.
And it was a sweep. The skirt of her emerald silk overgown, hemmed with gold threadwork, whispered opulently against the thick rug.
Alys wore a similar gown, hers deep crimson, laced over a similar linen chemise with full ribbon-trimmed sleeves.
Given the summer heat that clung to the house, even with the windows open and the evening beginning to darken outside, Alys had decided against a mantelet.
Her mother’s was golden-cream lace, draped to her elbows.
“That looks nice.” Jammetta Tixerrant halted behind Alys’s stool at the dresser and smiled in the mirror, wafting an approving hand over her daughter’s hair.
At least Alys didn’t need padding or extensions to achieve the length of braids that had been desirable for all genders, for the upper and merchant classes—and especially for healers—for the last few decades.
Some people thought it better to leave braids loose, to show off the length; some preferred them in knots and patterns to show off time and effort.
Alys knew her head would ache, from pins and from how tightly Henriette had pulled and tucked to achieve her complex style of braids, by the end of the night.
It was hard to believe she’d worn it like this most days until she turned eighteen.
Perhaps there was a research project in that: the fatiguing of pain nerves in the scalp, from sheer repetition?
It was amazing what you could get used to.
“We want to look our best tonight,” her mother went on.
“Scooch, darling. Thank you.” Seated, her hip pressed up against Alys’s on the stool, she leaned forward and tugged at the skin beside her own eyes with a fingertip.
“There’s been so much to do for tonight—such an honour to host the Firstnight dinner in the feast week, of course, but I want it all to be perfect.
And Madame Marcelle—both the Madames Marcelle—will spread scathing talk if anything falls short.
I’m looking positively haggard.” She turned and Alys met her mother’s direct gaze.
The unexpected eye contact was like a flick. “Take care of it for me, won’t you?”
Alys’s hand was halfway to her mother’s cheek before the request sank properly in. Aesthetic magic was one of the kinds that scholars were not supposed to do unsupervised. Not until they’d graduated.
Was this a test? Her mother had spoken with such offhand confidence, as if she’d asked this of Alys a hundred times before.
It must be. So many things in the world were tests wearing feathered masks, pretending to be something else.
Alys was long past the days of crying in frustration because nobody would explain the tests to her, but she wished the world would stop offering up new ones.
At the Academie, you were told exactly when and how and on what you were being examined. Alys had collapsed into her life there with a sigh of relief, right up until her cohort had been expected to start wielding their magic properly and everything went—difficult.
“Alys?”
Her mother knew the rules. But—it was the last week of fifth year, wasn’t it? What were a few days here and there? She could hear it exactly as her mother would say it, if she objected. Jammetta’s tests had only one possible outcome.
“Of course, Mama,” said Alys. “Hold still.”
Lady Tixerrant closed her eyes and did an impression of a lovely statue. She had this work done regularly by the family’s healer. The lines beside her eyes and across her brow were faint; they wouldn’t take much magic to coax back toward a smoother state, though they’d deepen again in a week.
Alys could do this. It was a small healing. Very small. She had learned—slowly, humiliatingly—to skim up a handful of magic from the pool within herself and to use it well. The smaller the handful, the easier it was.
She could do this.
She thinned her magic to a trickle and gentled it beneath her mother’s skin. Those fine crinkles and folds didn’t have the feel of disease. There was nothing wrong here. But—Remember? Alys’s magic whispered to the tissue—there’d been nothing wrong twenty years ago, either.
Alys’s magic created an easing and then a tightening of the tiniest muscles. A shift of fluid from blood vessels out into that tissue. It was a vibrato sort of magic, a note almost too high to be hummed.
She pulled her fingers away. Her mother peered back at the mirror, raised her eyebrows and lowered them, tilted her profile back and forth, trying on smiles like gloves.
“Lovely, darling, thank you.” Jammetta dropped a warm kiss on Alys’s forehead as she stood. “Come down soon, please—I just know Lady Calonne will arrive early, she always does, and I’m sure she’s going to offer you some work. A good name to have on your list when you’re just starting out, hm?”
Alys agreed. Her mother left. The room seemed to shift an inch, as if it had been teetering like a chair on two legs and had returned upright with a soft thump.
This, Alys’s childhood room, always seemed enormous in comparison to the rooms in the residence halls.
And she visited her home far more often than most scholars.
Lady Tixerrant had always brushed aside the assumption that Alys, once at the Academie, would stay on campus and devote all her time to study and work.
What nonsense. Alys was a Tixerrant; Alys had duties.
It had not been easy. Alys didn’t have her father’s focused intellect, and the Academie’s regime was designed to take all of your attention and effort.
Alys had attended card parties and charity board meetings and theatre premieres with lists of symptoms and diagrams of healing arrays pulsing red behind her eyes.
She’d fallen half asleep on her feet during ward rounds the morning after an ambassadorial ball, and mumbled excuses when called on to drag an answer from her exhausted mind.
She’d not had the time or energy to make close friends in her cohort. She’d barely had time to sleep.
Next week, presuming she graduated, she’d move back into this room and combine that busy social calendar with the responsibilities of being a private generalist healer.
Things would ease. She wouldn’t have to work long hours.
And she’d be able to charge whatever fees she wished; the circles her family moved in could afford to pay, and there were never enough healers to meet demand.
Alys touched one of her own temples. No lines beside her eyes—at twenty-three, she’d hardly expect them.
But a careful loop of braid covered the white fingerprint mark that bespoke a long course of healing: someone’s fingers laid upon her, day after day, magic burning inside her bones and bleaching her skin.
It was a constant pang to know that Alys would never be the kind of healer she’d so admired when she was a scared, curious child spending hours of every day at the Hospital Sieuxerr.
She’d never be the one doing great works and making a great difference.
Preserving lives that would otherwise be lost.
But it was for the best. If in five years she’d never worked out how to use her magic properly, never been able to bring it under control—how much more dangerous would it be for her to work at the Hospital?
To take part in complex healing arrays, where she might put far more than herself at risk?
To burn out and die in some messy, public way, and leave her parents bereft, as Ysabel Caudotte’s parents must be, today?
Just thinking of how her father would feel—
A quick, agonising dread, like the lid of a piano crashing onto her fingers. Alys swallowed. Her hands had curled convulsively.
No. It didn’t matter what fanciful hopes she’d had at sixteen.
A private healer wasn’t expected to do anything complicated.
Simply refer on to the Hospital, perhaps with a meaningful tap on someone’s shoulder to make sure their treatment happened quickly.
No doubt Estiene was destined for the same position his father currently held, and he’d be eminently tappable. He knew how the world worked.
The house bell rang downstairs.
“Alys!” This time it was her father’s voice. “Guests!”
“I’m coming,” said Alys.