Fifteen
“Don’t be a fool, man!” the sergeant bawled. “You’ve snatched threescore sparks back from the brink of the great flame, this night. You’re near dead yourself. And the general’s wounds . . .” A tortured look crawled over the courageous, homely face. “Even Mathé themself would be given pause.”
Chambely squelched to his feet. Those around saw a heroic figure cast in mud, glistening in the first rays of the much-sought dawn, swaying to a chorus of the groans of the dying.
In his ears those groans could have been the squalls of a babe—of Julietta’s babe, perhaps, conceived in that last precious night before he left for battle.
His vision was faint with fatigue. He saw her golden hair in the clouds at the horizon.
He was a Healer of Sieuxerr and there was only one answer he could give.
“Bring me to his side,” he said. “I will save him, even if it takes my own life to do so.”
—from Chambely At War!, book 17 in the Chambely series by La Royne
Estiene stood tucked into a shadow outside the back entrance to the fifth-year residence hall, in the deepening night.
This is not disentangling yourself from Jehan Fortier, part of his mind pointed out.
He ignored it.
Moyna had been carrying around a secret for Ysabel even past the girl’s death. If Estiene was going to keep doing the same for the living, he at least deserved to know what that secret was.
Estiene had known for the past two years that something took Jehan away from the residence halls at night and had him creeping back again in the small hours of morning. It didn’t happen nightly, or even weekly—certainly not enough to provide an excuse for how he managed to be late to everything.
At first Estiene had assumed Jehan was one of those who liked to study in the library at strange hours.
Later, he knew that Jehan’s brain stopped focusing on anything remotely intellectual at the stroke of nine o’clock; after that, he preferred things that used the rest of his body. Whatever those things might be.
The next sensible assumption was that Jehan was sleeping with a townie and had a reason to keep it secret.
Someone married, like Thumery? Or just someone he didn’t like much, and so didn’t care to have his name linked with?
Estiene had always slotted into that last category as far as Jehan was concerned. There could be others.
And Estiene had never, until that moment of weakness half an hour ago, asked.
Never pried. He’d kept quiet out of the same sense of self-preservation that had made him end things with Jehan, once and for all, when it became clear to him that he wouldn’t survive the slow dragging apart that loomed on the horizon.
He’d made a clean cut and hoped that the healing would be clean too.
But why would Jehan lie about it tonight?
Because it was obvious he had. He’d forcibly halted their discussion of Ysabel’s death with some feeble excuse about wanting sleep.
No; he was off to do whatever, or whomever, he’d been doing all along.
And he considered it more important than the investigation he’d been so keen for them all to embark on in the first place, and he was still keeping it secret.
This was not the week for keeping secrets. Estiene had spilled his, shameful as it was. He’d wanted so badly to keep it back. But the possibility of Brodier being told to handpick their exam group didn’t make sense without it.
No. Fuck it. Summer was upon them and Jehan was leaving. And Estiene would get to keep nothing of him but the scraps of knowledge he’d pathetically, greedily gathered over the past five years, so he would have this secret for himself.
Jehan emerged. He wasn’t wearing his grey robe, which meant that by the rules he shouldn’t be leaving Academie grounds. So of course he did.
Estiene had been afraid he’d be terrible at tailing someone, and Jehan would catch him immediately, but it turned out that this was a week for all sorts of new things.
There were no trams running in the old city—they’d stopped at sundown with the strike—so the streets were busier than usual with foot traffic.
Estiene kept bracing for Jehan to hail a horse-cab, or for himself to lose sight of Jehan’s tall figure, but he didn’t.
The visibility helped. The normal illumination of streetlamps was joined by lanterns this week: Lantern Night was still two days away, but there were as many of the things hung from eaves and beside doors as there’d been sweetmice for sale in the bakeries in the last few weeks.
Most of those hung already were made of fabric or glass or tough glossy paper, pulled out from storage and dusted off each year.
Estiene also noticed the lumpy, misshapen evidence of children practicing with tissue paper to work out the best shape and combination of colours for the night to come.
He’d heard that the Tatrancan capital of Szolduka had a similar festival, where the buildings were strung with strands of artificer-lights, or dotted with tiny metal lanterns which glowed hot on the inside, or decorated with glorious illusion-magic.
The Tatrancan festival wasn’t anything to do with Mathé, of course, it was the anniversary of some war victory or other.
Half the Levoric states had spent the last two centuries doing nothing but getting bored and making war with one another.
Fourth-year scholars sat through a mandatory set of lectures on military healing, which sounded ghastly: half the impossible triage of enough life-threatening wounds to exhaust twenty healers, and half a surprising focus on the florid gut diseases that resulted from digging latrine trenches in the wrong place.
Estiene shadowed Jehan for perhaps forty minutes.
They were headed north through the Sixth Quarter, toward the bend of the river.
Here the people on the streets had shorter hair and rougher clothes.
Estiene removed the most expensive of his ear-studs and put them in his pocket.
Half-consciously he was loosening his joints, ready to fight if attacked.
Part of him longed for his tiny room in the residence hall.
For the library smell of books and dust and mildew, or the hospital smell of soap and magic, chalk and blood.
He knew that world. He was comfortable in it.
This far afield, even in the Blue City, even in the robe, he was at risk of finding unknown corners of himself.
It was frightening. It was exhilarating.
And of course Jehan was involved. The last time Estiene had felt like this was when Jehan dragged him up onto the roof of the fifth-year hall with a flask of mulled wine, both of them cursing the deep chill of the stone even through a blanket laid down.
Estiene hadn’t been able to talk past the chatter of his teeth: half cold and half fear they’d be caught.
Jehan had laughed at him. And then drawn Estiene close and stoked him to a fever far past coherence while the winter moon watched, and afterward they’d argued over the faults and merits of a published array in the latest edition of the Hospital’s Proceedings for another hour, and Estiene had thought for a wild, unbalancing moment: I could be happy, like this. With nothing but this.
Jehan’s destination tonight was a warehouse in the northern docklands. The windows were blacked with fabric, only chinks of light leaking out. A slow boil of human noise became obvious as they moved closer.
Jehan exchanged words with two men at a side door who might as well have had the word bouncer tattooed on their bald heads, and was admitted quickly. More noise and light slid out the door in his wake: shouts and possibly cheers, or possibly anger, Estiene couldn’t tell.
He was in a friendly shadow, hovering. The absurdity of what he was doing seized him anew.
His mind filled with all the things that could be happening in that building and all the worst ways this could fall apart.
Ysabel Caudotte’s corpse hovered in his mind’s eye.
Even in the dead of night in the arse-cracks of the city, healers should be safe. Invulnerable.
But they weren’t.
Fear turned Estiene’s ankles weak. He should turn around and leave. He wasn’t Jehan; he wasn’t brave. He had a safe and clear future to step into.
A scatter of raindrops touched Estiene’s skin. Somewhere far distant, thunder grumbled. He’d barely noticed the lack of stars, the cloudiness of the dark. Early-summer rain took ages to build and would pass before morning, but it’d be drenching while it lasted.
The rain thickened rapidly. Estiene loosened his hands one more time and walked up to that side entrance of the warehouse.
The dampening air here smelled of river-edge and fish, and the flame lantern near the door cast a hotter orange than the streetlamps.
The heat of it came for Estiene’s wet cheeks with greedy fingers when he was close enough.
He swallowed hard. The bouncers might have been brothers—or perhaps that was just the matching bald heads and looming bulk—and they eyed Estiene closely, but didn’t bother to shift their weight. Estiene didn’t look like a threat.
Indeed—“I assume you’re not here to fight,” one of them said, having looked Estiene up and contemptuously down.
“Small ones can be scrappy,” said the other.
“Titch-fights aren’t on the bill this month. Nah, look at him. He likes to watch.”
“And my money’s as good as anyone’s,” Estiene said, a dry-mouthed gamble.
Two sets of eyebrows rose.
“I bet it is. Haven’t seen you here before, though.” A nod at his robe.
“Scholar Fortier thought I might be interested.” Only once it was out did he think that perhaps Jehan didn’t come here under his own name.
But the men exchanged an amused glance. Estiene leaned into the flimsy safety of the robe and summoned a smile.
“You’re not going to deny me some fun in Mathé’s own feast week, are you? ”