Twelve
Balance is all. Even the mage-healers, who throw up their pampered hands and claim to be helpless in the face of the suffering the serrage is causing, act on this principle: bringing the body back into balance with itself.
Balance is all. So many healers in one place is a weight on the scales of the world, and the spirits have noted that uneven weight.
The serrage is the other side of the scale falling into balance.
That is why the healers cannot banish it from the body, and why they themselves are afflicted in such numbers.
It is a punishment directed at them, and at Sieuxerr for first indulging their selfishness and then hoarding them in its own hospitals.
Sieuxerr ignores it at its peril. Our present suffering may be only the beginning.
brING THE HEALERS TO ACCOUNT.
—Anonymous flyer, distributed around Sieuxerr at the height of the serrage
According to Alys, one did not simply march into Secretary Denise Lefer’s office empty-handed, any more than one would turn up to a formal morning tea without bringing a gift for the hostess.
This was a level of social intricacy that Estiene’s grandmother usually handled, but he understood the basic concept.
Bribery.
“Courtesy,” said Alys.
It sounded like a rebuke. She was perhaps still angry at him for accusing Clement, even though Estiene had only been following the lines of reasoning she’d opened herself.
Angry? Mildly annoyed? Disappointed? He found it hard to tell, with Alys.
They were heading not for the food stalls outside the Hospital, and not for the enormous open-air Greenmarket, but for a smaller market crammed into a square that nudged up at the foot of a shabby temple.
Old-style carvings of abstract plants and flames curled over the temple’s grey stone frontage.
The only grand blue here was underfoot, where the bluestone was laid in a more intricate pattern than that found on most streets.
“Ah, there we are,” said Alys. The sun-glow of her golden hair was extinguished as they stepped into the shade of the temple.
She led Estiene to a stall selling jams and relishes and—Estiene blinked—sweet chestnut paste, which the elderly seller pulled out from beneath the stall with a conspiratorial wink.
“My very last jar,” the man creaked. “Precious as gold, this time of year.”
“Somehow,” Alys said to Estiene, “Leon here is always down to his very last jar. But it is hard to find chestnut paste in summer, and Denise Lefer loves it. Those fingers are giving you trouble, aren’t they, Leon? Have you been to the clinic?”
“Ah, it’s nothing worth bothering the healers over,” said Leon, but Alys had taken his hands in both of hers.
“You’ve grandchildren, I remember?” said Alys. “Tell me how they’re doing.”
And he did, at length, while Alys closed her eyes and stood there healing him for nearly ten minutes. It wasn’t only easing pain, either. The knobbly nodes of his arthritic fingers were visibly smaller when Alys was done.
It would never have occurred to Estiene to waste his magic on something like this, performed freely for a stranger far away from the Hospital.
And Alys showed none of the hesitation that she had during the exam.
Perhaps she was one of those people who got flustered to the point of incompetence when being judged, and hadn’t managed to wring it out of herself in the past five years.
Leon’s face was a crumple of smiling wrinkles afterward, and he produced another last jar of chestnut paste which he pressed into Alys’s hands.
Alys didn’t even keep the second jar for herself.
She left it as a donation at the temple, which was feast-week ablaze with small candles lit for the dead.
Religion had a lighter footprint in Rese than in Palia, their immediate neighbour to the south.
Most Sieuxerrans got by with the occasional respectful nod to the spirits and a lot of swearing by Mathé the First Healer, and then plunged happily into the broader celebrations of Mathé’s Feast. They all agreed on where magic came from and where the sparks of the dead went. Those were the important things.
“All right,” said Alys, sending Estiene a smile. “Let’s go and find out how the exam groups were set, and who would have seen the lists in advance. And if Saige or Brodier or anyone else on the faculty had the motive and opportunity to kill Ysabel.”
Estiene was feeling thoroughly irritable with moral inadequacy by then. The familiarity of the feeling didn’t make it any better.
“This missing notebook may not mean anything,” he said.
Clement had told them about Ysabel’s research notebook and the fact that it seemed to have vanished.
“Think about that new technique of Jehan’s.
Saige mightn’t care about Ysabel treading on his toes in the field of echo headaches if he can claim that project under his supervision.
I bet that technique’s going to be the best thing to come out of our cohort’s research. ”
He tried not to sound even more irritable, and failed.
His understanding of Jehan’s research before today had been based in listening drowsily to Jehan thinking aloud, Jehan’s brilliant mind flowing and linking ideas while he played with Estiene’s hair as if it were a necessary part of his process.
Which was worlds away from seeing it actually happen, and working a healing while the patient was half-under.
“It was amazing,” Alys agreed. “But if Saige knew that Ysabel was going to come out with something equally good . . . a final-year scholar outright besting him in his specialty area . . . that would hurt him, I think.”
“Enough that he’d kill for it?” Estiene said dubiously. They were back on the wide main street leading back to the northeastern corner of the Academie grounds.
Alys hesitated. Today she wore a linen chemise with narrow yellow and blue ribbons woven through the collar and spilling in bows across the grey shoulders of her robe. More ribbons were woven through her braids, and the corner of her mouth had puckered as if one were tugging tight there as well.
“Saige values his reputation enough that he’d lie for it,” she said. “I don’t know what else he’d do.”
“What do you mean?” Estiene asked. “His personal reputation isn’t exactly pristine.”
Every cohort had a handful of scholars who became besotted with the charismatic Dean of Curriculum, and Saige wasn’t prone to turning down those of his favourites who wanted to climb into bed with him.
It wasn’t unusual. The competition for the attention of Healer Dauvillier, the gorgeous and powerfully magical Head of Tumour Intervention at the Hospital, was even fiercer.
Estiene was pretty sure half of those who claimed to have fucked Dauvillier were lying; that, or Dauvillier was spending a great deal of time fingering scholars in ward storage rooms in between theatre sessions.
Another long hesitation. “You might have heard that I tried to sleep with him to improve my grades in intervention.”
“I . . . did hear that.”
“It wasn’t— I didn’t. He called me in for a meeting and suggested that private tutoring might help overcome my unfortunate deficiencies, so I could avoid wasting my precious summer on remediation.
” Alys’s voice had shifted to the smooth cadence of Rogier Saige.
Now it shifted back. “Even I could see what he really meant. When I refused, I think he was offended. The rumours that I’d propositioned him, and that he’d refused me, started the next day. ”
Estiene could imagine it all too easily. Saige, used to having his pick, would have realised his mistake fast and tried to scurry ahead of it. Alys Tixerrant, cousin to the Grand Duchesse, might be able to make trouble for him if she chose to.
“Why didn’t you correct the rumours?”
Alys gave him a very cousin-to-the-Grand-Duchesse look. “It didn’t seem worth bothering about,” she said, not entirely convincing. “It’s just gossip.”
Estiene didn’t know what to say to that.
They walked for a while in silence. He’d known Alys since they were children.
Now, twenty-three and on the precipice of the rest of their lives, she was making him feel childish again.
The scholars of their cohort talked dismissively about beautiful, useless Alys, who used her looks and her body to scrape herself through because she couldn’t manage the workload and didn’t have the magic.
He’d never added to that talk. But he’d never bothered to stop it, either.
“Ysabel would have spread it everywhere, if Saige had tried anything with her that she didn’t want,” he said finally. “Even without the prospect of her research making him look bad.”
“Yes.”
“You really do think this was murder.”
“Yes. Perhaps it wasn’t Saige in particular, but I really do. I know Ysabel experimented, but I can’t believe she’d lose control of her magic. She even tried to teach me her favourite visualisations for control, once, but,” a small sigh, “I couldn’t make it work. I never can.”
Back on campus, they discovered that Secretary Denise Lefer, the senior administrator of the Academie, had the hand-lettered wooden sign on her office door turned to NO.
One of the under-secretaries in the administration hall told Alys and Estiene that Lefer was taking a meeting that had run long, but should be done soon, if the scholars wanted to wait?
They waited. It wasn’t long before the Secretary’s door was wrenched open and a small cluster of faculty emerged, none of them looking pleased.
Estiene only realised Saige was among them when Alys stiffened beside him, but he didn’t have time to tense himself before all the blue robes exited, none of them sparing a glance for the pair of scholars perched on stools in a corner.