Fourteen
The body is a symphony. A collection of different instruments all placed together within the same skin, working to sustain life.
Any one of them might fall away from their assigned tune.
So then must a healer be a musician, able to identify the discordant note and correct it.
And even more so must a group of healers find harmony in their workings, in order to become something more than the sum of their individual notes.
—Apocryphal quote commonly attributed to Mathé the First Healer
Alys learned to love music long before she learned to heal. In fact, when a mage-tester had arrived at her house—no standing in queues at the community hall for the daughter of the Tixerrants—she’d been in the middle of harp practice.
Many things had been equally incomprehensible to Alys as a child. Sometimes a person said something and didn’t mean it, or meant something different to the last person who’d said it. Sometimes bodies changed and tried their very best to kill you, for no reason at all.
Alys had learned the value of anything that existed by simple rules.
Music written down told you exactly how to interact with it.
A semiquaver would always be the same length.
A third interval would always be a third.
So music suited her doubly well, for the comfort of these rules and for the incredulous, delighted shiver that raised bumps on her arms when she heard it played well.
She was an indifferent singer and her hands seemed determined to argue with one another on both harp and piano—but, quite accustomed to being mediocre, she was comfortable with the gap between her efforts and the ideal.
It was a gap that could be filled with zeal and enjoyment.
She remembered the day of her mage-testing distinctly.
The knock on the open door of her music room and the face of the metamage—surprisingly young, friendly, and with protruding ears—whose eyes widened at the sight of Alys in a way that Alys had been used to since she was fourteen.
He recovered fast and told her cheerfully that it shouldn’t take long, he’d have her back to her music soon.
Clearly he didn’t expect much. There was only one healer in Alys’s family at the time, an uncle on her father’s side.
The testing was a formality to be got out of the way now that Alys was of the proper age.
The mage-tester had a strong accent, unable to pronounce his Rs properly, but spoke fluent Resée; in fact he spoke seven languages, he told Alys when she asked.
Metamages had an odd magical gift, often used for this—formally detecting magic in others—but also for detecting illusions or magic used in other contexts.
They were based at the University and Centre for Magical Synthesis, far away in Aenhyr, but they travelled a lot.
The annual visit to Sieuxerr was a popular assignment.
Finding future healers was a privilege, he said with a warm smile.
The test took longer than anyone expected. Longer, Alys learned later, than it took for anyone except the borderline cases like herself.
It began with a list of questions about whether she’d ever felt anything in herself that she thought might be magic, especially when touching other people—some young people around testing age sensed it during intimacy, he said meaningfully—or even stirring in herself, drawing particular attention to when she had a bruise or a headache?
Alys’s body sometimes had trouble drawing attention to the fact that she was hungry. She wanted to get the questions right. She said no to all of them.
Unsurprised, the tester moved on. He pushed up one sleeve of his chemise and asked Alys to clasp with him, each of them holding the other’s wrist and forearm. His eyes snagged on the white thumbprint at her temple when her free hand nervously tucked a loop of braid away from her face.
“That must have been a long course of treatment,” he said. He knew a little about healing, then. “How old were you?”
“Eight and then nine.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Yes,” said Alys.
“This won’t.” Another smile. He told her that he would begin by using his own magic in a way designed to coax out any of hers, if it existed. She could imagine it like a current of water moving from his skin to hers. And then he wanted her to imagine her own current sloshing into him in turn.
Alys was happy to do that. She didn’t mind imagining. She made the imagined water very specific, thinking about the smell of the river and the way its surface furred with light on bright, windy days.
“And now it’s coming back to me—almost there—and now imagine yours, coming into my hand and up my arm and down into my own body.”
For a moment Alys felt like she might fall off her chair. Like a pit had opened in her stomach. She felt unsafe and sick, and she made herself think, firmly, hand. Arm. Hand. Arm. She obediently nudged her imagined current toward the tester’s elbow.
“There’s . . .” Alys trailed off. Again not wanting to get it wrong.
“Yes?” he asked eventually.
Alys bit her lip. “Sorry. I’m not sure. There’s something . . . in the way? I’m probably not doing it right, I’m sorry.”
His expression sharpened. “Try it again.”
She did. The mage-tester hummed and frowned to himself and made some notes, and then got her to do it again, and again, each time moving her fingers to different places on his arm, each time asking her to concentrate in a slightly different way.
Alys’s fingertips began to feel fuzzy and odd, as they had on the day when she snuck underfoot in the kitchen when the cook was preparing Galucean hotsoup, and she couldn’t resist dipping them in the pot of yellow powder that produced the soup’s numbing heat.
“She meets the threshold,” the tester told her mother, afterward. “Only just, but she meets it. Congratu . . . lations.” As if he’d realised halfway through the word that perhaps an apology, or commiserations, would be more welcome.
Jammetta Tixerrant let out a quick incredulous spurt of laughter and then sobered just as quickly, staring at her daughter as if Alys had climbed onto the table during dinner and recited a filthy poem. And so the course of Alys’s life had swung wildly and unstoppably askew.
She’d come across the page on compulsory chorale in the Academie handbook, read until creased and dog-eared in the summer before she began first year, and felt a melting sense of relief. This, at least, she already knew how to enjoy.
And now it was the week of Mathé’s Feast. On the feast day, the day of the fifth case of the Grand Exam, the Academie Sieuxerr held a concert. All five cohort choirs had been rehearsing for months.
Their cohort had had the same volunteer conductor since they began—another tradition.
Healer Crespin Thumery was a handsome man with vigorous energy and a quick laugh, a diagnostician who had, the gossip went, been destined for a glorious career as a theatre-singer if he hadn’t tested into the Academie.
Today he wore his hair in the crown-style, and laughed little.
Perhaps he thought it’d be disrespectful, given Ysabel’s death.
Thumery had clearly been told why one of his favourite altos wasn’t standing at the front of the section where she’d normally be.
He insisted on lighting a candle for her, which was a nice gesture.
The candle burned all through rehearsal, set on a stand far enough from Thumery that it would endanger neither his sleeves nor the bundle of sheet music on his own conducting stand.
The fifth-years always performed the concert’s lengthy final piece: the Twilight Chorale for the First Healer, composed two centuries ago by a sadistically talented Skapiestan composer who, Alys was sure, had been personally wronged at one point by a soprano.
Thumery, who’d already dropped some music and accidentally taken them twice through the same folk song until someone spoke up, seemed to snap back into the room during the Twilight Chorale run-through.
He waved them to a halt, delivered a warning look to the back row where the more gossipy baritones had a tendency to talk through rehearsal, and collected the alto section with a frown.
“All right, I know Ysabel—Caudotte—had a strong voice, but there’s more than enough of you without her. We went through those runs in the allegro section two weeks ago, and they were close to perfect then. Savoye, I know you have it. From bar—two-three-nine? Do you need the chord?”
Academie chorale was always sung unaccompanied, the better to force them to listen to and weave their voices around one another.
Instead of a piano to give them the pitch, Thumery had a gorgeous little music box which had been a present from his wife, the youngest daughter of the extremely rich Lord de Gannes.
It wasn’t artificer work, but a piece of rare wood-mage working from Orolund, set with panels of gold and icepearls.
Thumery liked to show it off. It was beautiful and expensive for something that did more or less the same job as a full scale of tuning forks, but Alys was the last person who could turn her nose up at things that were beautiful and expensive.
Clement said something that Alys couldn’t hear from where she stood. Thumery nodded.
“Good. From there until the end of the section. The rest of you listen. Everyone else sit down and shut up.”
Most days that would have been a useless direction, but then Clement started to sing.
The chorale hall was built for the purpose.
The King of Orolund, two centuries ago, had personally magicked and sent down some wooden panels that hung suspended from the ceiling at angles and created acoustics that were almost too good to be true.
Music rippled and soared in this room, its harshness rubbed off and its richness expanded.