Fourteen #2
There was no harshness to be found in Clement Savoye’s voice at all. This part of the chorale was building to the end, a densely layered jubilation, and the first alto part was a series of throbbing runs like the dipping flight of a lark.
Clement took the notes in the certain wings of their voice, and flew.
They weren’t even projecting, Alys could tell.
But quiet as it was, the song in Old Levone faltered neither in pronunciation, rhythm, nor pitch, and somehow a message came through the melody that had never been there before: a sense of warm, anticipatory sorrow in the midst of joy.
The knowledge that everything had an end.
Alys’s skin shivered with shocked reaction and a lump sat in her throat—Mathé’s bones, she nearly wanted to cry.
Clement came to the end of the section.
An impressed mutter of “Fuck me” came from the row of tenors behind Alys.
Alys blinked until her eyes stopped stinging.
She’d heard Clement’s voice in the exam this morning, but that had been a handful of businesslike notes to tether everyone’s magic.
Their cohort had been singing together once a week for five years.
Why hadn’t they all known Clement could sing like that?
Well—why hadn’t any of them known anything about Clement at all? Ysabel Caudotte, confident and talented, would always be called upon to demonstrate for her section when needed.
“Er, yes,” said Thumery. Even he looked taken aback. “I—that was—exactly. Thank you. Did you hear that?” he demanded of the rest of the altos, as if anyone could have failed to hear it. “We’ll take it from the same place.”
Now chatter did begin to swirl, as always happened when Thumery was doing section work.
Alys exchanged a smile with Marie Houllegate, who had the seat next to Alys’s and who’d always been friendly.
Marie was an offshoot of an extensive and prosperous merchant family and, while not precisely a bonded scholar, was close enough.
Her family had paid for her Academie education with the strong understanding that she’d be at the beck and call of endless cousins returning from trading journeys with a fever, a rash, and the sheepish expression of someone convinced they caught it between the sheets.
At least Alys’s family was small.
“How’s your group faring in the exam so far?” Marie asked. “I heard you’re in the group that found Ysabel.”
Alys nodded. Similar talk was probably happening all around them. The geas forbade specifics unless you were talking with your own exam group, but there were ways to dance around the generalities. “I think we’ve passed both so far. I hope so, anyway. What did your group make of the case today?”
Marie made a face. “I bet you anything it was old Bellows who picked that one. I knew they’d find a way to inflict their pet topic on us in the Grand Exam, when it wasn’t in the writtens.”
Alys’s nod-and-smile was automatic, but confusion gave way to surprise. Belhomme, the Dean of Anatomy, had a passion for the narrow specialisation of lung diseases; thus the nickname they’d carried around the Academie for forty years.
Her heart beat a little faster. She thought quickly.
“And yesterday,” she said. “I’m surprised they managed to scrape together enough patients.”
Marie gave her a puzzled look.
Alys dared a few more sideways poking questions, and by the time Thumery finished bullying the altos and collected them all for a final run-through of the piece, Marie probably had an even lower estimation of Alys’s intelligence than previously.
But Alys was bursting with new knowledge and a new suspicion.
She wanted to be locked away with her exam group now.
She had to wait, of course. They’d planned to meet briefly and share any new information after rehearsal.
As soon as Thumery dismissed them, Alys scrambled to gather their exam group on the steps outside, with a pause so that she and Clement could fetch a stack of cups and one of the jugs of lemon-and-herb-infused water that soothed a busy throat, and a plate of the nut-biscuits that the residence hall kitchens had sent over to the chorale hall.
One of Clement’s braids was coming unpinned. Today they wore their dark brown hair in a common style: two braids wound together at the back and pinned flat. A single loose pin meant the end of one braid sagged away from their head.
Alys caught herself reaching to fix it. Clement looked a query at Alys’s upraised hand.
“Pin,” Alys said weakly, and gestured.
After a moment Clement smiled. “My hands are full. Do you mind?”
Oh, Mathé’s bones, there was a dimple swallowing that tiny dark freckle beside their mouth.
This close, Alys could see another dark spot like a collar-jewel in the nape of Clement’s neck.
And another at the angle of their jaw, right where you’d put your fingertip to check the pulse.
Or where you might spray scent. Was Clement wearing scent?
Alys could smell blackcurrant tea. Heady tannin and fruits.
Her fingers tingled helplessly as she adjusted the pin.
“Thanks,” said Clement.
Alys retrieved the biscuits and they joined the others on the steps outside the hall.
“We’re missing Estiene.” Alys looked around. Estiene was lingering to the side of the entrance, being talked at by Sab Lavalle.
Alys believed, truly, that most people were decent at heart, but even she sometimes struggled to think the best of Sabastian Lavalle, who had never met a topic he didn’t consider himself an authority on, and who Alys had once seen talk nonstop at a patient for five minutes and then walk out and complain about the patient’s gall in suggesting their own diagnosis, despite the fact that the patient was a retired medic.
When faced with Sab, Alys had a tendency to hide in ward storage rooms so that she didn’t get stuck nodding politely along to his drivel.
Someone like Ysabel or Moyna would no doubt tell him he was a pompous clot to his face.
Estiene, his current target, returned Alys’s wave and said, “Yes, I’m coming. Piss off, won’t you, Sab.”
“No need to brush me off your shoes like that. I’ll come along.”
“No. We’re doing an exam case debrief,” Estiene snapped.
Sab rolled his eyes. “I thought that delightfully whorish new hairstyle might be a sign you’re becoming less of a joyless stick. Can’t you let your exam group enjoy their evening?”
Wisely leaving that as the final blow, he strolled off to inflict himself on the Pasquier twins just as Estiene puffed himself up and snarled, “Whorish?” in carrying tones.
Several heads turned.
Jehan said, “I mean . . .”
“Stuff a biscuit into Jehan’s mouth, please,” Clement said to Alys. “Or Estiene’s. Or both.”
Alys stifled a laugh and handed out biscuits all round.
Jehan took three. They went and sat on a corner of the swept stone stairs where the light from the hall entrance thinned and merged with the warmer gold light of a standing lamp, and they could balance their cups on the ground or between their knees.
Several other groups of scholars lingered, none within earshot, similarly enjoying their snacks in the evening air.
It was nearly eight o’clock. There was a new humid thickness and the scent of possible rain in the air that hadn’t been there when rehearsal started, and a thin slice of dying sunset orange could be glimpsed between buildings.
The clouded ink of the sky swallowed the outlines of the bluestone edifices.
“I’ll start,” said Estiene. He was touching the ends of his hair again.
He looked like he’d rather swallow coals, but he told them about his father’s agreement with the Chancellor, leading straight in to what he and Alys had discovered about the precarious state of the Academie’s funding, the openness to blatant corruption, Saige and Brodier both having their jobs endangered, and—as a throwaway final point—the process by which exam groups and exam slots were chosen.
There was a stunned, digestive quiet. Moyna, staring at Estiene, started to say something. Jehan reached out to slap her arm.
“Fuck off,” she muttered, but subsided.
“And,” said Alys. She gestured excitedly with her biscuit, which sent crumbs down the crossed front of her robe.
“I went back, this afternoon, when Secretary Lefer was somewhere else. I found the under-secretary who helped with the draw, and she said that they did it three days before the Grand Exam began. And that by the time she was called into the office, Dean Brodier had gotten impatient and already done the six exam groups for the first time slot of the day—she had all the scraps of paper with the names in piles. She didn’t think anything of it. ”
“And what did you bribe her with?” asked Estiene.
“Summer-berry cake from the third-year kitchens,” said Alys promptly. “One of the cooks there is niece to my family’s housekeeper.”
There was a general nostalgic groan for those particular berry cakes, the recipe for which was bewilderingly and fiercely hoarded by the head cook of the third-year residence hall’s kitchens.
Third-years could do a brisk trade in barter for it, in the few precious months of late spring and summer before moving day arrived.
“Well done you,” said Jehan. “So Brodier certainly could have picked our group by hand. Either for Estiene’s sake, or . . . some other reason?”
Alys lifted a hand. She felt a weird little thrill when everyone quieted again. This almost was as good as a stage-play.
“And I think we’re doing different cases from the other exam groups,” she said, and told them about the sort-of-hints she’d managed to get out of Marie.
“That would explain how Ysabel could know what our exam cases are and still not be cheating herself,” said Jehan, lighting up. “Right? But—no, they wouldn’t do different cases for everyone. Surely. How could you ever standardise it? And what would be the point of writing that many cases?”