Twelve #2
Lefer turned the sign on her open door around with such force that it bounced back to NO and she had to unwind the twine to display the only slightly less hostile WHAT?
The Secretary was a short, solid woman with thin white hair in a single practical braid, and two permanent lines like quotation marks between her brows.
She turned these lines onto one of the under-secretaries.
“Four out of eight attendees. A new record. I know the faculty like to ignore their invitations unless engraved on their foreheads with a scalpel, but this is why we send reminders.”
“I did send—”
“And has someone been told to clean that ghastly graffiti off the city-side wall of the fourth-year residence hall yet? Have they done it? Well, go and find out. Mathé’s sacred spark, and the bloody artificers are striking next week, too,” she muttered, and caught sight of Estiene and Alys.
She visibly fought her face into a more welcoming expression as their identities sank in.
“Scholar Tixerrant. Scholar Marcelle. Give me a minute to write something down before I forget, and I’ll be right with you. ”
She vanished back into her office. Alys and Estiene exchanged a look.
Alys ventured, “Should I—”
“You’re the one who said we shouldn’t ask direct questions, in case we rouse suspicion,” said Estiene in an undertone. “Right?”
Alys looked at the jar of chestnut paste in her hand.
Estiene bit back something rude, and took it from her.
This was why he hadn’t wanted anyone else to come along with him.
At least, if he had to swallow the shame of someone else knowing what his father had done on his behalf, Alys wasn’t the worst option.
It could have been Moyna, with her sarcastic eyes and her naked disdain, or Clement, who probably hated him now. It could have been Jehan.
And Alys had told him about Saige, and clearly hadn’t wanted to.
“I know what to say,” he said.
It was awful, it tasted like last night’s canelé come rolling up sourly into his mouth, but Estiene sat on the edge of a chair in the Secretary’s office with Alys sitting next to him and told them both the truth, which was that last week his father had hosted a dinner for some members of the Duchy Council, and summoned Estiene along.
It was a precious few hours he should have spent studying, but which the Head Healer had told him would be better spent making himself properly known to the people who controlled the priorities and the budget of the city.
At the end of the night, when Estiene was yawning his way downstairs after smuggling Marion some candied almonds, he’d overheard a conversation he wasn’t meant to hear.
His father and Chancellor Colet Morant, over the dregs of expensive brandy, agreeing that Estiene would not fail the Grand Exam, and would in fact be assured of a high graduation rank.
A favour, between colleagues. Except that Estiene had sat through that dinner and knew that the Hospital had a stronger voice than the Academie when it came to the flow of money and influence among the Grand Duchesse’s advisors. It was coercion. Well: corruption.
Secretary Lefer had been very pleased by the jar of chestnut paste. Now those lines on her forehead sank deeper.
“Why,” she said, “are you telling me this, Scholar Marcelle?”
How undignified the truth was.
“You know everything that happens in the Academie,” said Estiene. His face felt hot. “I want to know if he’s done it for me before.”
Lefer gazed at him for a while. She looked as if she were wondering if she could hand the chestnut paste back and shove the words back into Estiene’s mouth with it.
Then she leaned back in her chair, which wasn’t much larger or fancier than the chairs on Estiene and Alys’s side of the desk, and laughed.
A resigned, barely amused laugh. The words fuck it all might as well have misted out with the sound.
She reached for the jar of chestnut paste and removed first the wax seal and then the wide cork stopper.
“I didn’t know about that particular arrangement,” she said, “and I can’t answer your question.
Nobody keeps records of this. But I can’t blame the Chancellor at all.
If you ask me, they should just forget the exams. Graduate all of you and be done.
No point dragging any of you through a repeated year, with the Duchy Council demanding to know why we couldn’t graduate more healers and get them working, when we’re in such desperate need of them now.
Not to mention the expense of running the Grand Exams in the first place.
” She shrugged. “It’s not official policy, but I doubt anyone will be allowed to fail this year, barring an egregious and obvious disaster. ”
A tiny intake of breath from Alys. Estiene concurred.
“I’d have thought,” said Alys slowly, “that the Academie wouldn’t mind scholars repeating a year. If it were only about the expense.”
“Indeed,” said Lefer.
Estiene’s head spun, then he worked it out.
Fees were paid regardless, by sponsors or scholars or the city.
Repeating a year extracted another year’s worth of fees out of a scholar; and he vaguely remembered, from that dinner, someone complaining that the Academie’s bylaws, based in Mathé’s own teachings, strictly prohibited those fees being raised above the reasonable cost of education and board.
So fewer failures, thanks to the pressures left behind by the serrage, will mean cutting an income line on the all-important Academie budget.
“Thanks for your honesty,” said Estiene. It came out of him bone-dry.
“You’re fifth-years. You’re old enough to know how the world works,” said Lefer.
“Or were you still entertaining the delusion that the Academie can afford to be a pristine tower of uncorrupted learning? Do you really think you’re the first child of someone influential or rich enough to have a finger tip the scales of their success?
” Her smile was, awfully, almost kind. She had found a wooden spoon in a drawer of her desk, and took a generous scoop of the chestnut paste.
“You’re not that special, Scholar Marcelle.
Don’t make a fuss. If your father’s going to make it worth the Chancellor’s while, then assume we need it more than we need your moral qualms.”
Estiene’s face burned now.
“I’ve failed plenty.” Alys was fiddling with a yellow ribbon at her throat, tangling it around a fingertip. “I had to do summer remediation twice.”
“And if someone had cared to offer a bribe on your behalf, I’m sure it would have been accepted.
The Academie accepts them. It doesn’t solicit them.
Though no doubt,” waving the now-empty spoon fatalistically, “we’ll get there, once it becomes clear that there is a finite number of staff who can be dismissed in the name of budgeting before it becomes impossible to run a university altogether.
” Another of those dry laughs. “Perhaps I’ll have lost my job by then, so it won’t be my problem. ”
“Who’s been dismissed recently?” Alys sat more upright. No doubt she was remembering a stage-play she’d seen where murder was committed by a disgruntled employee. How that could possibly relate to Ysabel, Estiene failed to see.
“Three of my administrators at the start of third term, to begin with,” said Lefer.
More chestnut paste went down with the air of a grizzled sailor sipping from a bottle of rum.
“And you fifth-years wouldn’t have noticed, but we’ve lost Healers Taverne and Blutel, so the first- and second-year lectures have become almost a full-time job, being done by faculty who already have jobs at the Hospital, and are usually also doing the job of someone else who retired with the serrage.
I can’t imagine the mess we’re going to be in next year, when they leave a single person in charge of both Curriculum and Assessment. ”
It was Estiene’s turn to sit up. He’d been feeling in need of a drink himself—listening to Lefer was like being rubbed by harsh sacking, and he hated problems that he couldn’t solve—but this was a thread worth tugging on.
“One of the Deans is retiring? Which one? Saige or Brodier?”
“That is the question,” Lefer said dryly. “And another one I don’t have the answer to yet. The governance council is meeting at midsummer, and they’ll decide then. One of them will be restructured out of a position and encouraged to spend more time on healing work.”
“Because there aren’t enough healers,” said Alys.
“Because there are never enough healers,” said Lefer. “And the Hospital tells the Duchy Council that we need more of you working as healers, not wasting time on teaching and research, and so.” An expansive spoon gesture.
And so. It was almost more of a shock than hearing about corruption.
Senior Academie positions were prestigious and practically life-long appointments; Saige was the youngest of the Deans by a decade, and he was well over forty.
To hear of a post being eliminated, even if it saved the same amount in salary as several part-time lecturers . . .
“And Brodier and Saige know about this?” Estiene asked. “That only one of them is going to keep their job?”
“They’ve known since midyear,” said Lefer. “Everyone knows what’s been happening to the Academie since the serrage.”
Except, her look said, you. Would Estiene have heard about this if he had more friends in their cohort?
Surely he’d have heard something anyway.
But fourth-years couldn’t afford to notice anything except their textbooks, and fifth-years spent far more time at the Hospital than in lectures on Academie grounds.