Eleven
I read with interest the letter from my esteemed colleague Healer R.
J. Defaloise theorising that the disease processes of microvives and phantomes are in fact the same process in different forms. One can only wonder which of them Healer Defaloise is currently suffering from, and in which particular region of the brain diagnostic magic would isolate the unfortunate disease process which has led them to labour under such a profound—one might say, delusional?
—misunderstanding. In the brief set of remarks modestly proffered below I intend to—
—Opening to a Letter to the Editor, Healer M. E. Caignel, in Annals of Mathé’s Art, volume XLII
In fact the knocking room was occupied by a handful of third-years, heads bowed over textbooks and notes, but seniority was seniority—they gathered up their things to leave when faced with a group of purple-edged robes.
One of them looked like he might be about to open his mouth and tell them who his parents were, like a larval form of Estiene, but he caught sight of Estiene himself and visibly decided he was outfathered.
Jehan swallowed a laugh.
“It’s Balenne, isn’t it? Lord Baizelat’s grandniece?” said Alys to a scrawny red-haired girl with expensive boots and pearls dripping from both ears. “The anatomy labs are usually empty this week, and the bodykeepers will open them for study if you ask politely and don’t touch anything.”
“Thanks, Tixerrant,” Balenne mumbled. “We all heard about— I mean, we’re sorry about Caudotte.”
The other third-years added their own mumbles and nods of sympathy. Some of them were directed at Clement.
“Can you tell us anything about what happened to her?” asked Balenne. “You wouldn’t believe some of the rumours that are flying.”
“I’m sorry, no,” said Alys, and made the hand-flick that signalled a geas. Not that any of them did know what happened.
“Half a scholarship says she got foolish and finally tried something too ambitious even for her,” said the larval Estiene. He had the air of someone who was going to shoot a hand into the air and report his neighbour for copying his work.
“Soften your tongue, Theo, she’s in the flame,” said Balenne.
“She heard I was struggling to get the hang of group arrays and she was kind enough to give us a tutorial, in winter term,” she added to Alys.
“It was an odd technique. Very difficult for third-years,” with pride.
“But she had a way of making you believe you could do things, you know?”
Jehan did know.
The third-years left, and the room was theirs.
The knocking room was one of the highest rooms in the Academie; it was where you took visiting relatives, to show off, and where the Chancellor and senior faculty took a lot of meetings.
It was set in the tower of the North Wing, above a floor of staff offices and beneath the chamber holding the enormous bronze bells which were only rung for graduations, start-of-year ceremonies, and Lantern Night.
It had a view down onto the quad. From this height, at this time of year, the quartered green lawn and purple and yellow flowering trees looked like a painting.
A quirk of the Academie’s plumbing, for reasons known only to water-mages and architects—Jehan vaguely thought it had something to do with gravity, or sunlight, or both—meant that a shaft holding thick water pipes ran down one wall of the tower and thus one wall of the room, and at odd intervals they made a loud sound exactly like someone was trapped in the wall and trying to attract your attention by knocking.
Which was what one told first-year scholars who hadn’t yet been clued in to the truth.
The tables had been shoved into a central block surrounded by high-backed chairs upholstered in leather.
Jehan slid himself into one, his back to the morning sunlight pouring through the quad-side window, and collapsed onto his own folded arms. He was hungry and tired and buzzing with satisfaction.
It had worked. It had worked most other times since he’d perfected the technique, of course, but most other times he’d been keeping a large, cursing fighter half-under so that someone could yank their shoulder into place and they could get back into the ring.
Never part of a formal array, with someone else performing a proper healing on the patient.
“There has to be another way to do that case,” he said, thinking aloud. “They wouldn’t have given us a patient with pearl-pox damage if there wasn’t. Did they really expect five scholars to be able to take her fully under?”
“There are a few other options, I think,” said Clement, who’d taken a seat near his. “But the patient wouldn’t enjoy them.”
“Paralysis?” said Estiene.
A rather aghast silence. Paralysis would fix the problem of tension, but it would leave a patient unable to move while they experienced the pain of having their ankle rebroken and healed. Sometimes inflicting pain was unavoidable, but that was extreme.
“How awful,” said Alys.
“And Ysabel’s letter didn’t have any other solutions,” said Clement. “It had Jehan’s solution.”
“This is all so deeply fucking weird,” Jehan said. “How did she know what the cases would be? And if her death had anything to do—”
Alys interrupted him. “We should wait for Moyna before we start discussing it properly.” She leaned forward with the air of a hostess prepared to make small talk until the soup was served. “So. Um. What’s everyone got planned for the summ— Oh, bother, I mean for next year?”
There was an instant chorus of alarmed Touch blue!
until Jehan, closest to the unplastered external wall, extended an arm backward to brush his knuckles against a bluestone brick.
If you were out in the city you knelt to touch the street stones.
You didn’t make plans for the summer. Well, you did, but you didn’t talk about them until exam results were posted.
Perhaps Alys had spent enough summers remediating that she’d stopped caring about tempting the spirits.
The pipes knocked, as if in reproving reply.
“Sorry, sorry.” Alys was pink again. “Jehan. I didn’t know you were bonded. Somewhere in Fenehaf, you said?”
“The main hospital in Mostau,” said Jehan. “It’s mostly staffed by medics, apparently; they can only afford one Academie scholarship every two years. I’m sure I’ll be both coddled and overworked, but at least we’re used to that.”
And at least he only owed three years instead of the usual five.
The Mostau scholarship had been held by another scholar in their cohort who’d died, burning out unexpectedly and dramatically near the end of second year, and by that stage not many people were prepared to double-dose their language lessons in a new tongue in order to catch up.
Jehan had realised by then that he needed both the money and the escape hatch out of the Blue City, and had seized at it.
Things hadn’t worked out exactly as he’d hoped. But they would, soon. Very soon. Touch blue; which he did, again, disguising it as a stretch.
Everyone knew Estiene’s future plans. Alys told them she was going straight into private practice—she looked neither pleased nor displeased about it, and Jehan supposed it was no business of his if the upper crust of Sieuxerr paid pots of money for the services of a half-baked healer who seemed afraid of her own magic, no matter how highborn and pleasant she was.
“I’ll apply to the Littlebridge,” said Clement, when the question swung to them.
“I’ve never had an aptitude for any specialty in particular, and my written exams have always been average.
” Their voice was fading by the last words, as if sun-bleached by direct attention.
Very different from the ringing tone with which they’d steadied Luisa’s healing array.
“Their junior generalist positions are often filled by city-bonded graduates.”
If you weren’t bonded by a scholarship, then you either paid your Academie fees outright or you were city-bonded; you accumulated the debt and worked wherever the Committee told you to while you were paying it back.
A bonded position like Jehan’s was a trap, but it was also a certainty.
If you graduated with debt, as a good half of every cohort did, the Committee might sell your labour anywhere.
Clement’s was a sensible plan: to volunteer for the Blue City’s smaller and less prestigious hospital, in the hope they didn’t get sent elsewhere instead.
Moyna entered the room at that point, sweaty and plucking at the collar of her chemise.
She collapsed into a chair next to Clement and said, no preamble, “The letters are really from Ysabel, best as I could tell. She left them at a posthouse last week with payment for delayed delivery. And they wouldn’t let me have them early.
We’ll just have to take them day by day. ”
“She set this all up last week?” said Jehan.
“Yes,” said Moyna. “I hate to say it, but it sounds like Ysabel knew she wouldn’t be here.”
“Letters sent from beyond the flame,” said Alys, as if tasting it.
“No.” Clement had found that ringing tone again.
Their eyes flashed with the closest thing to pure anger Jehan had seen on them, and that square jaw set attractively.
Jehan’s blood gave an interested little fizz of appreciation.
“They aren’t suicide notes. They’re a scheme.
Cleverness for its own sake, because the geas means we wouldn’t be able to discuss the cases with her on the specific days. ”
“You seem very certain,” said Moyna, eyes narrowing. “What did Ysabel tell you, her closest friend, about all of this business with the letters?”
“Nothing!” flashed Clement, and Alys said, “Moyna!” in the same soften-your-tongue tone that Balenne had used.
“No, she’s right,” said Jehan. “Nobody thinks you’re a murderer, Clement—”
“Don’t we?” said Estiene.
“Estiene!”