Seven
It can be hard to disentangle lurid rumour from true historical record.
The most reliable primary source from this time appears to be a letter written by the visiting truth-taster Evert Zuermont to his patron the Queen Mother of Katte, after observing the public execution in Sieuxerr of a man found guilty of killing his wife, a healer.
Zuermont hints at prolonged agonies, but avoids specifically describing the method of execution in order to, as he puts it, “not offend Your Majesty’s eyes with foul words, nor your mind with gruesome images.
” Such obfuscation from a mage whose purpose was to discover and tell the truth is, one must admit, both ironic and frustrating for the modern historian.
—From Stone and Song: A History of the Blue City, J. de la Noe
Estiene’s grandmother insisted on switching seats with Marion, stranding the poor girl at the other end of the grand table next to Lord Tixerrant.
Alys’s father had two modes: gazing into the middle distance and ignoring his dinner guests while he chewed the same mouthful for half a minute, and explaining his dusty intellectual passions in a level of detail that made Estiene think longingly of upending the water jug.
Marion met Estiene’s eyes as the last savoury course was being removed.
She made a subtle face at him. Estiene made sure Oudine—his stepmother, Marion’s mother—was looking elsewhere before returning it.
Marion had the Marcelle black hair, and her mother’s round-tipped nose, and at thirteen had some real personality beginning to burst out of her seams. Estiene was already worried for her, torn between wanting her to shine and wanting to teach her how to keep herself shuttered; how to delay as long as possible the looks from parents and grandparents that said, You sometimes make it very hard to love you.
“Everything was delicious, Jammetta,” said Estiene’s grandmother. “And what an original choice of vegetable dishes.”
Lady Tixerrant’s smile didn’t flicker. “You’re too kind, Marguerite.”
“I hope you enjoyed the spiced hare, Estiene,” Alys murmured.
Estiene sat more upright. Alys wasn’t one for social digs.
After eyeing her warily, and finding her eyeing him equally warily back, he decided she was offering a private joke, and smiled.
Plates of sweetmice—of course—and canelés were being placed on the table.
Estiene served himself and listened to a story his father had launched into telling.
Something about a visitor in the Hospital today who’d had the gall to wear blue.
“And not just shoes or a sash, mind you—a full journade! Truly, there’s a point where respect for Mathé pushes up on disrespect for the profession.”
Mamie Marguerite made a hmph sound. “In my day, not even the feast week would have been an excuse for so much as a blue ribbon, and a healer wouldn’t be seen in any other colour.”
Lady Calonne, whose braids were woven through with both glass ornaments and ribbons in azure, pursed her mouth. Alys, in red, looked at her plate.
Estiene’s light overgown was periwinkle blue with black embroidered panels.
His father wore the full, heavy, stone-blue houppelande gown that was considered old-fashioned these days, but still worn by plenty of healers at special occasions.
This was probably the last Firstnight dinner of Mathé’s Feast where Estiene would not be expected to wear one himself.
The caramel-rich smell of rum rose from the canelé that Estiene was dissecting with the side of his spoon.
It clotted him with memory. The first night he ever laid eyes on Jehan Fortier—not knowing his name, then, seeing only a skinny eighteen-year-old with a piercing laugh and untidy clothes, one of the crowd of first-year scholars celebrating their first night as a cohort; their last night before classes began.
Jehan had surged up to the bar and asked for rum, lots of rum, and pushed one of the tiny glasses expansively sideways to Estiene, who took it and threw it heedlessly back because he was giddy with relief and excitement at being a scholar of the Academie, at last, and when their eyes met the thought arrived in Estiene’s mind like a tram jerking to a halt:
I want to suck his cock.
He’d never thought anything like that before.
Certainly not about a complete stranger.
He stood there with his mouth burning with half-swallowed rum, and the thought must have been all over his face because Jehan paused in the act of turning with his tray, looked Estiene up and down, and then gifted him with both a sunny drunken leer and another drink.
That night was a beginning.
And now it’d ended, whatever it had been after five years of constantly shifting and writhing and changing shape in Estiene’s heart without permission.
Estiene had to hold it together through four more days of the Grand Exam, and not do anything stupid like haul Jehan into storage rooms and shout at him and melt into his hands.
He was so close. He’d done the right thing. He’d disentangled.
“—ridiculous, if you ask me.”
Estiene dragged himself back to the conversation, which had moved on. His father was still dominating it.
“Is it so ridiculous, though? More than one foreign court or city council has made an official complaint, I heard,” said the Vicomte Paigni. “A noticeable drop in skill and quality in the new bonded healers.”
The Head Healer snorted. “Perhaps if they weren’t all so greedy, and let us keep our graduated scholars for a few years at the Hospital. We here in Sieuxerr lost the most healers, after all! It’s the healers elsewhere who are likely to have escaped the serrage altogether.”
And many of those healers had returned to Sieuxerr as soon as their bonded contracts allowed them to do so, summoned by pleas for help from the vastly understaffed Hospital.
“Every so often someone trots out the idea of mandatory Hospital years after graduation,” said Paigni.
The Vicomte was on the Duchy Council. He was smiling at Estiene’s father in a way that didn’t seem outright hostile, but also didn’t quite involve his eyes.
“Are you saying that the Academie doesn’t produce fully qualified healers able to work independently anywhere in the world? ”
“I’m saying more supervised experience is always better. It’s true for every profession.”
“You have to admit, Marcelle, the threshold for entry was lowered. Is it so unreasonable that we’d be seeing the results of that?”
The table had quietened, interested; the conversation was taking place in measured tones that nevertheless carried.
“More grubs, hey?” someone else interjected.
“I would hope we’re above that kind of talk here,” said Mamie Marguerite.
Under her stare, the young man who’d said it turned his drink-flushed face away and mumbled something.
Healers might rudely and colloquially call their unaccredited colleagues after the grubby shade of pewter-blue robes they wore, but not in good company.
And, like wearing blue in the feast week, nobody else was supposed to do it.
There weren’t many grubs in the world. It was hard to fail your fifth year three times in a row. But there’d been a handful of woefully inept scholars who’d managed it during Estiene’s time at the Academie, and that was by all accounts an unusual spike. The Vicomte might have had a point.
Estiene’s father replied as if there’d been no interruption.
“The vultures have simply heard about the lowered threshold and tried to use it as an excuse to pay less for a healer, even though it takes more money to get a low-powered scholar through the Academie, once you take remediation costs into account. Or to keep them from burning out, even though they’ve precious little magic to do it with. ”
Estiene felt a stab of awkwardness on Alys’s behalf.
Everyone knew that she wasn’t much of a healer.
It was partly her own fault, which was irritating; she’d surely be at least competent if she actually dedicated herself to her studies instead of gadding off to parties every week.
Still, there was no need to harp on the subject here at her own parents’ table.
Alys was pulling apart a sweetmouse as though there were gold in the centre instead of almond paste, not looking at anyone.
“Speaking of which,” put in Lord Calonne, “did we all hear about one of the fifth-year scholars being found dead this morning, before she could sit the Grand Exam? Tragic. Burned out, I suppose.”
Word had spread. Of course it had. It had been nearly a full day, and the death of a healer was terrible news. Estiene’s family had already chewed over the topic; Estiene had murmured something about the proctor geas, and supposed he would have to do so again now.
“It is tragic,” spoke up Alys, with unexpected firmness. Not arguing with the claim of burnout or airing any melodramatic theories about blackmail here, Estiene noted. “She was one of the best scholars we had.”
“Yes. Scholar Caudotte is a true loss to the profession,” said Estiene’s father. “Not just anyone would have been beating out Estiene for Dux Scolaris, after all.”
“You must be very proud of him,” said Lady Tixerrant, smoothly moving the conversation on from death like the good hostess she was.
“Of course we are.” His father smiled faintly at Estiene. Estiene managed a nod in return, and put a spoonful of canelé in his mouth so that he wouldn’t have to say anything.
He might have said: Proud? Are you really?
He might have said: I overheard that conversation you had last week with Chancellor Morant.
That conversation in which Head Healer Marcelle had made it very clear that his son would not be allowed to fail the Grand Exam, and would in fact pass it with a high enough graduation mark to ensure he easily qualified for the competitive junior diagnostics-track position.
And the Chancellor of the Academie had agreed.
Estiene hadn’t been fucking planning on failing the Grand Exam. He’d never failed an exam.
Except . . . given what he’d heard, perhaps he had. How could he trust any of his results up to this point? Had he truly ended up third in the cohort, in second year? Did his father believe him capable of achieving anything on his own merit?
He wasn’t going to ask his father those questions. He was too afraid of knowing the answers. And so he’d walked around dizzied with doubt for the past week, kept awake by it, pricked constantly with the reminder as if someone had fastened a rose-thorn to the inside of his shoe.
Dux Scolaris, Estiene thought, taking another spoonful of dessert.
It tasted sweet, and then sharply alcoholic, and then like nothing at all.