Fifteen #3
A voice close to Estiene was urgently trying to place a bet on what sounded like a sliding scale of damage. On how badly the healer would be injured before the end of the bout.
Estiene couldn’t look away. The fight’s rhythm blurred, all violence, all drumbeat and rainsong.
Fists, nails, dirty tricks. Both men were bloodied, but Jehan especially so.
Green took hold of Jehan’s arm and something happened, a twist, an elbow to the face—a doubled crunch of bone that made Estiene feel faint, even as his blood ran hotter and his breath came fast.
And then Jehan gave a hoarse yell, pain layered with uncaring, and flung himself in a twisting motion which Estiene had seen him do in the self-defence ring.
Instead of seeking an escape, though, Jehan used it to bring his opponent down to the ground with him, the two of them a writhing knot of limbs sliding and arms hooking beneath necks. Jehan’s arm. Green’s neck.
Green tapped out. It was over.
Both of them stood, slowly.
Jehan was facing in Estiene’s direction, looking far over Estiene’s head.
He grinned and his teeth were red. He looked happy, and it didn’t look like a performance.
Estiene knew that happiness. It was one of the things he loved most about Jehan.
As the years of their studies progressed, happiness in most of the Academie’s scholars became a complicated and conditional thing.
But before, during, and after sex—and sometimes the before and after were lengthy and full of conversation—Jehan laughed and smiled as if he was still that gangly eighteen-year-old buying drinks for strangers.
As if he still felt the future like a shining promise, instead of a burden to be carefully and responsibly carried along a predetermined path.
He shone now, trembling as he was with exertion and pain.
Then he climbed down from the ring. Estiene pushed at once through the crowd in the same direction.
He came up with a plan on the way, and when he saw the small doorway through which Jehan was vanishing, he marched right up to it and, when stopped by yet another solid man with a frown, was ready with an impatient look to accompany his lie.
“Fortier—the healer. I’m meeting him. He’s expecting me.”
“I’m sure,” he was told flatly. “You can meet him outside.”
There was a buzzing laugh from behind him. It was the man in the gold journade. The laughter had been friendly enough, and the man wasn’t much taller than Estiene, but his eyes were uncreased and hard. His assessing gaze landed on Estiene like an ice-brick.
“Fortier’s hardly going to complain if we put that in his room, is he?” this man said.
Estiene swallowed twin bursts of nerves and indignity, and pinched the fabric of his robe in illustration. “We’re friends.” Also a lie.
No answer but a smile. The larger man stepped aside as if it had been a signal, and jerked his head in invitation.
He led Estiene through the doorway and into a much lower-ceilinged space—another building jammed up against the warehouse?
Converted offices, perhaps?—with dark corridors and dank, unpleasant scents turned up high by the humidity.
The rain was steady and louder, closer, on the roof.
“Don’t take it into your head to go wandering around,” the man said, stopping at a half-open door and shoving it wide.
Estiene thanked him automatically, as if he were an usher at a stage-play, and then got himself through the door before the man could see his acute embarrassment.
He had the sudden, silly wish that Alys were there.
No doubt she’d have recited the proper etiquette for being delivered like an indecent parcel to an underground ring-fighter’s dressing room.
She’d have charmed the solid man and learned his name and full life story.
The room was empty. No Jehan. It was larger than Estiene had expected, with a plain cot—grubby brown-stained sheet, no covers—and a long row of cupboards, along with a small wardrobe and a large plumbed sink, and a single chair set before a table and mirror.
Spread out on the table were a series of medic-tools: bandages, tonics, even a suture kit.
This wasn’t just a dressing room. It was a healer’s workroom.
Away from the heart-thumping alertness that the warehouse had forced into him, exhaustion gnawed at Estiene’s edges.
It was later than he was usually awake. He wouldn’t have touched that cot for a first-author publication in the Annals and half of Alys’s fortune, so he went and sat gingerly on the very edge of the chair.
He closed his eyes and his eyelids immediately delivered a vision of Jehan—that blood-covered jubilant version of Jehan that Estiene had never seen before. But other people had. Regularly.
It hurt far more than it had any right to, that Jehan had kept this secret from him. Estiene had no claim on Jehan. They’d never been friends. That was it; that was the hurt. Jehan knew Estiene better than anyone in the world, probably—and didn’t like him.
What fucking chance did Estiene have with anyone, then? There was something in him that stopped a person short of love unless they were family and they had to. And even then. You make it so difficult sometimes.
A noise; a step. Estiene opened his eyes and Jehan was there, arrested with the door part-closed behind him, staring at Estiene.
“What the fuck,” Jehan said.
He sounded uncertain rather than angry, as if he were waiting for a mage to drop the illusion. His voice came out thick past lips split and swollen, and blood was a scarlet mess down his bare torso, down his arms, covering the lines of his vulnerable unwrapped hands.
No power that existed could stop Estiene from crossing the room.
Magic flooded out from his fingertips where they fumbled and slid on the blood-slickness of Jehan’s chest, the unfocused and righteous surge of his anger making it feel rougher and more dangerous than diagnostics ever had before: magic like a hand dragging a man’s head back by a fist in the hair, magic like a crashing tide, searching for the hurt.