Thirteen
Setting aside the wider mythos and storytelling around the life of Mathé the First Healer, we are confident of the basic historical facts.
They were born in the riverside town that is now the oldest quarter of Sieuxerr.
They discovered at the age of manifestation that instead of manipulating stone and metal, like all other mages of the area, they had an entirely new gift: healing.
Unsure of what would happen, their family convinced them to keep it quiet.
Working on their own body and those of trusted friends to establish the basic principles and techniques of their power, Mathé waited nearly a decade before more healing mages manifested: five of them, all a similar age.
And so Mathé made themself known, and took apprentices, and the art of healing began.
—From Their Sacred Spark: Mathé the First Healer in the Popular Imagination, by C. Lausanne
Moyna Apprice on a mission reminded Clement strongly of Ysabel.
Even though Clement was the one who had suggested talking to the artificers in the first place, Moyna had the kind of impatient energy that would snatch up the chalk of any given problem.
Which was fine with Clement. They were most comfortable a step behind someone else’s shoulder.
Today their grief was a choking cloud of sullenness and they were thinned out and overwhelmed from how much talking they’d already done, in the exam and the discussion in the knocking room; from how intently they’d been watched in both of those places.
Not to mention being accused of secret-keeping at best and murdering their best friend at worst. Clement cordially wished that twenty pigeons would take a shit on Estiene Marcelle’s perfect hair.
They closed their eyes and imagined it. Lovely.
Of course, they would put up with whatever they had to, to get to the bottom of Ysabel’s death. Moyna at least had a robust and spiky kind of self-assurance. And no problems talking at all.
“You’d think they’d have let us out of this evening’s rehearsal, this week of all weeks,” Moyna was saying irritably, as they crossed the Academie grounds to the artificers’ workshop.
Neither of them had ever been there before.
They’d had to check with the caretaker staff which building it actually was.
“We know the pieces back to front. And who in our cohort’s going to be in the mood for singing when none of us know yet whether we’ve passed the Grand Exam? ”
I will, thought Clement. They wouldn’t have minded if chorale were held three times a week.
But Moyna was either doing them a favour or coming along to make sure Clement didn’t do anything suspicious—or both—so they made an effort to stick with the conversation.
“You’ve a sibling at the Academie too, don’t you? Will your parents be coming to the performance on feast day?”
“Oh, they’ll be there,” said Moyna. “If only to make sure that I don’t run off in the middle of it, never to be heard from again.”
Was that a joke? It had been pitched like one, albeit only just. Moyna didn’t seem to be waiting for a smile; she gave an annoyed shake of her head and ran a hand down and up the strap of her satchel where it crossed her body. She added, “What about yours?”
“My parents?” Clement’s mind went softly blank. Breathe. “No. They won’t come.” Would they? Surely not.
“Townies?” Moyna asked. “Healers?”
At least she hadn’t asked Why not, which a lot of people—even after five years at the Academie, which was enough to introduce you to a wide range of family realities—would ask. Still. Clement was not going to talk about their parents.
They said, “I’m close with Ysabel’s mothers, and I know they’ll come. They’re both healers.”
The two of them were nearly at the workshop.
It was a single-level building in a different style to the grandeur of the quad and the Rondelle, surrounded by a moat of shabby grass and a pointless waist-high fence of wrought iron, with an equally pointless gate which was standing half open.
Moyna paused with her hand on this gate and looked at Clement, squinting as the sun struck her eyes.
Small, fine hairs curled in a frame around her face.
Clement stopped. It was that or run into her.
“What?”
Moyna kept looking, diagnostically. The skin of Clement’s nose and cheeks crawled from the directness of her gaze.
There was a hungry and restless look to Moyna sometimes, like a creature on the verge of gnawing off its own leg.
Did rabbits really do that? Foxes? Hares?
Clement, born and raised in Sieuxerr, had seen rabbits only in stew.
They’d also seen a man whose foot had been nearly severed by a wolf-trap.
He’d been carried into the city on a cart, and was grey and near-dead with blood loss by the time the healers started work.
Finally Moyna said, “Were you in love with her? Fucking her? Wanted to fuck her? What?”
Twenty pigeons. Fifty pigeons. Clement’s teeth ached with not slapping her.
“Is this how you usually take a history, Scholar Apprice?” they asked. “Because I have some concerns about your bedside manner, if so.”
The laugh looked like it was startled onto Moyna’s mouth. “Come on. You can’t blame me for being curious.”
“Like Estiene was curious?”
Silence. The laughing mouth fell into a sour, embarrassed little expression.
“I do know you know what a friendship is,” said Clement, relenting. “I’ve seen you with Jehan.”
“Who I have fucked, for the record,” said Moyna. “Okay, yes. But you and Ysabel always seemed so intense. Like the bricks of a building. Cemented together so tight that nobody else could fit between.”
“She was the most important person in my life,” Clement said. The grief burned their lungs. “But that was never what I wanted from her. Or her from me.”
Ysabel was the shield. Ysabel was exhilarating and Clement loved her like a necessary organ, but also needed to be able to close a door on her at the end of the day.
Ysabel had a self-sufficient heart, for all that it loved fiercely and well.
Clement wanted, one day, to be needed more than Ysabel had ever needed anyone.
“All right,” said Moyna. Still not moving. “Would you have known if she was fucking someone else? Or serious about someone?”
A parade of memories. Ysabel was as likely to complain about someone’s proficiency in bed as their lecturing style, though her appetite for sex went through month-long ebbs and peaks according to some strange equation.
Since they hit third year she’d never gone for any other scholars of the Academie.
Clement always had the sense that Ysabel didn’t think their peers deserved her yet, and the even stronger sense that Ysabel didn’t consider them enough of a challenge.
Sometimes she dragged Clement out into the city, on precious nights of free-enough time, and they played games of choosing townie partners for each other in crowded drinking houses.
They knew each other’s tastes well. And Ysabel was at her most hilarious when draping an arm around a bemused girl’s shoulders, pointing to Clement, and proceeding to outline Clement’s sterling qualities as a casual sexual partner, as if selling a prime harvest of grapes at market.
Would Clement have known, if Ysabel had met someone and was serious about them?
“I always thought so,” Clement said. “But . . .”
But those inexplicable letters, and the knowledge they revealed. But the research notebook. But someone out there who’d found a reason to silence Ysabel and send her spark into the flame. So many secrets. Clement’s chest ached even more. They wanted to slip an inch sideways from their body.
Moyna began to say something.
An explosive sound crashed through the air. It came from the workshop in front of them and was loud enough that Clement’s ears and teeth buzzed with the aftermath.
“What was that?” Moyna shoved the gate fully open in order to run for the front door of the workshop.
Clement followed her through the door and stopped, a pace inside, as the noise hit.
This wasn’t explosive noise—though the fiercely smoking wreckage on a wide bench, mechanical or magical or both, showed where the initial blast had come from.
It was the noise of raised voices. Upset.
Angry. Several of them overlapping. Clement, motionless with a tight throat, fought for the sensation in their toes and hands.
The loudest shouter was a tall man with a sooty red-raw wound of a cheek, yelling in the face of a woman who had a hand clapped to her arm. Blood seeped through the sleeve of her chemise as she yelled back. Neither injury looked urgent.
Three more people in the room, not counting Moyna. All down on the scrubbed stone floor: one kneeling, two lying. One of the two writhed and cursed, adding to the noise, as the kneeling man bent over them and tried to calm them down. The other was, unsettlingly, still as a corpse. Arms flung out.
“Clement. Clement.” Their attention broke onto Moyna, who was snapping fingers in their face. “Mathé’s spark, there you are. We should—”
“You take the noisy one, I’ll take the quiet one,” said Clement. Speaking helped their body thaw into movement. “Go.”
The motionless artificer was a thin woman, middle-aged teetering on elderly, with a golden chain around her neck to match the piercing in her nose.
Clement’s magic sent back the smoky discordance of a bad concussion, with a hint of something nastier threatening at the back of the skull.
It must have taken the force when she fell.