Fourteen #3
“And I’m still not sure how this all ends up with Ysabel dead,” said Clement.
They were looking into their cup. “Moyna and I didn’t find out anything solid about who might have been in the Rondelle that night.
” They quickly outlined their own fact-finding expedition, which highlighted a different aspect of the Academie’s politics, and left a long period of time in which the Rondelle would have been empty of witnesses before the doors locked at midnight.
“Plenty of time to kill is also plenty of time to move a body,” they finished. “Unless the point was for her to be found there. I don’t know. I got the feeling that Decroy knew more than he was saying, but what can we do? Accuse him of lying?”
“I can try and find out if he likes chestnut paste,” Alys offered, with a smile.
Clement said, dryly, “Can you get a jar of better pay and working conditions for the Academie’s non-healer mages?”
“So you’re thinking an unhappy artificer with a grudge against the Academie might have done it?” Jehan said. “But the question is still why Ysabel?”
Moyna cleared her throat. “Not an artificer, but— Fuck. All right. Alys, yesterday you mentioned blackmail plots and secret lovers and all that nonsense. And I didn’t think it was going to mean anything, but seems like nothing means anything in this mess. Or else everything does.”
“What is it?” said Alys.
Moyna gave a resigned huff. “Ysabel was fucking Thumery.”
Clement said, “What?”
“I’m not going to mime it.”
“Are you sure?”
“I didn’t catch them at it, but—near enough, I suppose. I found out by accident and I was never going to tell. I figured it wasn’t any of my business.”
“Oh,” said Clement. “That’s why you were asking earlier if I . . . No, I didn’t know. No.”
“That Thumery?” Jehan gestured at the rehearsal hall. “Married into riches and power Crespin Thumery—and Mathé’s spark, his wife’s pregnant, too, isn’t she? He wouldn’t shut up about it last month.”
“That can’t have anything to do with our exam cases,” Estiene said.
“It’s a better motive for murder than anything that is,” Moyna shot back.
She was right. It was probably the oldest motive of all.
“Moyna,” said Alys. Thumery had surely left by now—he never stuck around to chat after rehearsal, although Alys was now reading all sorts of sordid possibilities into that—but she couldn’t help glancing around and lowering her voice further. “Does he know that you know?”
“I don’t know. I just opened a door at the wrong time, for a split second. Ysabel was the one who saw me, and she found me afterward and I told her I wouldn’t go spreading it around. I don’t know if she told Thumery.”
Clement made a humming sort of sigh. “Well. Thank you. So how do we find out where he was, two nights—”
“Do we have to do this now?” said Jehan, plaintive. He drained his cup and stood. “We can do tomorrow’s planning after tomorrow’s exam, surely. Nobody’s going charging out after alibis tonight. I for one intend to have an early night and get my beauty sleep.”
“We hardly ever see you at breakfast and you’re always late,” said Estiene. “How much sleep do you think you need, exactly?”
“Scholar Marcelle. I’d almost be tempted to think that was a compliment.”
“It wasn’t.”
Jehan blinked slowly at Estiene, then showed his teeth. It wasn’t nearly as pleasant as his usual smile. “I know.”
There wasn’t much point in continuing once Jehan had left.
Alys lingered to help Clement stack the cups and take them with the plate and jug back inside the hall.
The sight of the empty chairs and mosaic wall and silently gleaming wood made her remember all over again the sudden, unexpected glory of Clement’s singing.
She wanted to say something about it. She had no idea if Clement would welcome that or not. But the silence between them had gone from comfortable to—at least on Alys’s side—unbearable.
“What do you think’s the bad blood between Estiene and Jehan?” she blurted instead.
“I don’t know either of them well enough to guess.” But Clement gave Alys a sideways look as they went back out and down the steps. “Do you have a stage-play in mind about it? Are you hoping they fell out over a lover and fought a duel in their honour?”
“I think . . .” Honesty came out. There was nothing in its way. “I think they hurt each other somehow and they feel bad about it and don’t know how to fix it, and so they keep on hurting because it’s easier. Estiene is like that. He always has to—move the damage somewhere.”
“You’re good at that,” Clement said, after a moment. “Noticing things about people. Imagining their inner lives.”
Alys’s cheeks heated. Then she realised that Clement was, very slightly—you might miss it, except for the deepened shadow of the dimple—smiling again.
“We spend all our day on inner lives,” Alys said. Her lips felt more fumbling than usual. “Aren’t you interested in people? Don’t you think that’s what patients need from us? For us to just be people, like they are, and interested in what they have to say?”
Alys knew the look that patients got: the desperation for healers to extend their magic and fix it. But she also knew that the line between healer and patient was just a matter of luck, and that most patients would accept proof that you were simply willing to be with them, sincerely, in their pain.
And Alys had to be good at that part of being a healer, because she wasn’t much good at the rest.
Clement looked at her for a while. Barely blinking. The two of them had paused again in the lamplight, practically alone now, and Clement’s eyes were like spring growth reflected in the surface of a lake. The length of the look made Alys feel tightly wound, but she didn’t want to glance away.
“Yes,” Clement said. “I agree. I do think that.”
Oh dear, said a small part of Alys.
Probably it was the same part that had tried to make her cry during rehearsal.
That part wanted, for a wild moment, for Clement to reach out and touch her beneath her chin like—like a violin rest. A steady pressure that would mean she was safe.
If Clement Savoye were to touch Alys like that, perhaps say something else to her in that incredible voice, warm as polished wood, then surely the world would become completely still and completely comprehensible.
And maybe from there Alys could unravel Clement’s hair and drench her fingers in the silky scent of blackcurrants, and Clement could reach through Alys’s skin and rearrange her organs, then put them back neatly and snugly so they didn’t rub, so Alys never again felt like she didn’t fit together right.
Alys smiled at the image until Clement’s eyes began to smile back. Then she swallowed it all down and bid Clement good night, and walked back to the residence hall on her own.
Attracting people was easy. Alys knew she was nice to look at. But dealing with their expectations of her, after five years of unchecked rumours—no. There was too much of Alys, and it matched up too poorly to what people assumed, and she didn’t know how to bridge that gap.
Some rules were obvious, though. You didn’t tell people, especially ones you didn’t know well, that you thought they would do a good job of choosing a comfortable arrangement for your guts.
Alys was nice to look at, and nicer when she kept her mouth shut. She’d learned that lesson at least.