Nine
Before you run to complain about the unfairness of such an arrangement, consider the history of the profession and the roots of our traditions.
Mathé themself had five apprentices, and impressed upon them the importance of trust in one’s fellow healers.
And so the Grand Exam has existed in its current form since the first cohort to enter the Academie: a group of five scholars, who pass or fail in fellowship with one another.
—From the Scholars’ Handbook of the Academie Sieuxerr
The Academie’s self-defence gym was emptier than usual.
It was a large building set between the second-year residence hall and the anatomy labs, floored with thick mats and with plenty of open space to train.
The upper halls were reserved for classes; the lowest floor, where Jehan was now, was open at all hours.
The air smelled of sweat and the lavender-scented oil they used to rub down the fixtures.
Bright artificer-lights illuminated the space.
The walls were panelled with wood and mirrors, and a row of heavy leather punching bags hung suspended from chains.
Jehan, in his oldest chemise and pair of chausses, headed for those.
He crossed paths with a sweaty, red-faced Konrad Omeyer, who’d clearly just finished his own workout.
Konrad had Jehan’s height and the rough-hewn, muscular build one might expect to see on masons’ or carpenters’ apprentices, the lucky swine.
Jehan could lift weights and punch bags from here until the extinguishing of the great flame, and he’d never look like that.
“Mathé’s luck,” said Jehan, as they passed one another.
Konrad gave a grunt that might have been agreement, but certainly wasn’t a friendly return of the sentiment, and stomped off toward the door.
“And fuck you too,” said Jehan under his breath.
Maybe the man cultivated that surly attitude to match his jawline.
Certainly Konrad had never bothered to connect with anyone in their cohort, on his return to the Academie from his year off after nearly burning out.
Though, on reflection, Jehan would feel even more like expressing himself via punching bag if he were in Konrad’s boots this week.
Imagine the pressure of possibly failing and therefore having to repeat fifth year again.
And Konrad didn’t have Jehan’s delightful laid-back personality, either.
He was more in the mould of Ysabel and Estiene: powerful and smart, driven and ambitious, making no secret of how much he wanted a complex intervention-track job once he graduated.
Might he want it enough to clear his potential competition out of the way?
Fuck. Alys’s stories had wormed under Jehan’s skin.
He shook his head and went over to the punching bags, pulling off his chemise.
The gym really was a wasteland. Only a pair of kids—they had to be first-years, surely, they looked like such children—sparring clumsily in the far corner and emitting the occasional giggle that implied this was just as much foreplay as it was a fight.
The last week of exam month must have everyone in their rooms or nailed to the library carrels.
Now, in the hour just after dinner was served at the residence halls, there’d normally be a solid scattering of scholars from all five years here, purging the pressures of the tutorial room or the humiliation of a clinical group led by a particularly scathing healer.
Mathé had personally taught their own apprentices to fight.
There was a mosaic frieze depicting this on the gym’s wall, a twin to the one hung in the chorale rehearsal hall.
Chorale taught you how healing magic worked, on a level that the mind could connect with instinctively.
It honed your ear and voice so that you could hone your magic to whatever form was required of it, and trained you to work as part of a harmonious group.
Fighting was to make you aware of the body: its strengths, its limitations.
And since its earliest days, the Academie had wanted its healers—most of whom, in the small early cohorts, were destined to live as precious jewels in the coronets of various royal courts—to be able to fight off kidnappers desperate to capture healers for their own benefit.
Nobody was going to kidnap Jehan if he had anything to say about it. And he knew his body’s abilities, on the mat and in the ring, from his marrow to his toenails.
He warmed up and then began to test those abilities, hurling blow after blow and kick after kick at the solid lavender-scented leather of the suspended bag.
He left his hands bare and unwrapped, and still his mind fretted and thrashed, resisting the distraction.
Fucking Estiene fucking Marcelle with his perfect hungry mouth and his new hair and his ambition-haunted eyes.
Ysabel Caudotte, dead. And her name on a note which raised far more questions than it answered, addressed to Jehan himself.
Wham. Thump. The bag’s chain gave an alarming creak where it was anchored in the ceiling.
There was more equipment—not to mention more skilled sparring partners—at Blavot’s gym, but Jehan wanted to stay on Academie grounds for now.
Here on the edge of true summer, the edge of Jehan’s escape to Fenehaf, he was trying not to remind Guion Blavot of his existence any more than he had to. Time enough for that tomorrow night.
A frisson of fear skipped across his shoulders. He imagined it gathering like magic in his fist, and slammed that fist into the bag. His skin tore. Pain glowed from knuckles to wrist.
Jehan grinned and licked the first welling of blood away. Blood tasted the same on the tongue as it did to the probing touch of magic.
More blows, and more. Before long there wasn’t much skin left across his knuckles at all, and the bag was blood-smeared. Jehan added some kicks and then some knee blows, hard enough that he imagined he could feel the fluid rushing to the patellar bursa.
The next punch snapped his fifth metacarpal, and the next kick—angled carelessly—crumpled something in his knee.
Jehan was tempted to continue, but he stopped, panting jubilantly.
It was always a thrill to see how far the body could be pushed, and then to drag it back again.
He’d never been afraid of healing himself.
It felt more natural, almost, than healing others.
To his magic the torn meniscus felt like young greenshoot freshly peeled and then sliced down to the white heart; the broken bone was rougher, like the harsh sound of gravel underfoot.
Jehan stood with his eyes unfocused and hands pressed to his own skin, humming to keep the flow of magic even, until his injuries knitted themselves.
His bones knew magic so well. Sometimes he wondered if the scholars who would cut him open, learning anatomy on him when he was dead, would somehow be able to see the countless times the bones of his hands had been shattered and remade.
But that was only a fancy. Of course they wouldn’t.
The effect of magic was invisible to the eye, and the lingering magic of a recent healing could only be sensed in a living body.
Jehan extended and flexed his healed fingers. Perhaps he should save some of his energy. There was no telling what tomorrow’s exam case would be. And if nothing else, he’d need it for tomorrow night.
But it didn’t matter if he was exhausted by the end of the week, did it?
As long as his group passed the Grand Exam, he had the whole summer to recover.
No more study. No more exams. It was an unreal thought.
The first years of work as a healer were generally acknowledged to be hideous in their own way, especially if you were at the Hospital or had a bad mentor in a generalist position elsewhere, but not as bad as the Academie.
Or maybe that was another lie told to scholars to haul them through the five years.
Jehan wouldn’t be surprised. Still—he was used to having very little free time.
And it was good for him. It limited the damage.
When he’d mage-tested unexpectedly at sixteen, it had been a kind of relief to know he had to enter the Academie.
He’d already changed his mind twenty times about what he wanted to do with his life.
He’d thought, cheerfully: Having a decision this large made for me, taken right out of my hands, will surely limit how badly I can fuck the rest of it up.
He’d been wrong.
He moved into a flurry of faster movements, moving in a circle around the bag and barely allowing his heart to beat between blows, until he was struggling for breath.
Another pause. The first-years had vanished in the interim; Jehan had the gym to himself.
He shook the tingles from his hand and sucked in air, watching himself in the mirror.
His face was ruddy with exertion, his braid even more of a rat’s tail than usual, and his skin shone with sweat over the muscles he’d worked hard to add to his lean arms.
Jehan was in his element. He tried to imagine Estiene here, with his prissy jewellery and perfectly put-together poise—
It was no good. He couldn’t muster the necessary disdain. Estiene had learned self-defence like everyone else. Jehan had seen Estiene fight, ears bare and face taut with concentration. And he’d seen Estiene undone and panting and brought to exhaustion in other ways.
No. He wouldn’t think about that.
It was so stupid. Jehan could have left the gym that moment and found twenty willing partners without breaking any more of a sweat.
But Jehan didn’t feel like sex when he was stressed.
Usually. Estiene was an exception. And if Jehan were to go searching for companionship tonight, he’d be doing it to try to dislodge the foothold that Estiene had in Jehan’s—everything—and that wouldn’t be fair.
People deserved to be appreciated for who they were instead of who they weren’t.
Tonight Estiene was wherever it was the children of the rich and highborn went at the start of the feast week, surrounded by people more appropriate to his illustrious future than a bonded Ninth Quarter nobody like Jehan.
And Ysabel was in the flame, and Jehan was alive.
He straightened his shoulders and loosened his knees, and pulled back for the next blow.