Sixteen
As a tiny and modestly populated state possessing the only supply of a naturally occurring precious resource, why is Sieuxerr not being constantly invaded with an eye to controlling that supply?
The answers involve such geographic factors as it being enclaved, meaning that the would-be invader must first pass through some part of Rese.
But the single greatest fear of any nation is that it would fail in such an attempt, and be thereafter shunned by the Academie, the Grand Duchy of Sieuxerr, and qualified healers alike.
Healers are a gift of the spirits for the whole world, and the whole world can bid for their services.
Any one country’s attempts to seize control of the Blue City would be immediately opposed by a coalition of, well, everyone else.
—From Stone and Song: A History of the Blue City, J. de la Noe
There had always been people who claimed to feel healing magic.
Not the effect of it, which could be painful in some cases and blissful in others.
The magic, itself. Perhaps they were right.
After all, nobody could inhabit another person’s skin and taste their experience to tell for sure.
But Jehan, with five years of experience at the Academie—along with a much more blasé approach to experimenting with his own body than the average scholar—was fairly sure such claims were bullshit.
Only metamages could actually feel your magic. If anyone ever bothered to run a rigorous blinded study on those patients who claimed to feel diagnostic magic running through their body, surely they’d be proven wrong.
And yet.
Jehan would have sworn he could feel Estiene’s magic now.
A scalding splash right over his sternum became a series of rivulets spreading out to the few remaining injuries Jehan hadn’t already healed.
The part of him always questioning, always wanting to pull a concept apart, tried to point out that this was probably seventy percent pure, helpless, practiced lust. The other thirty percent could be his own imagination—his own knowledge of where the damage was, combined with the sound of the rain slamming down outside.
He’d already healed the wrist, the jaw, the teeth, the worst and deepest of the gouges. He’d left himself some pulled intercostal muscles and the stinging split of his lips and inside his cheek. Little treats. Little reminders.
Now they tingled and pulsed with wholeness. Estiene had two palms flat on Jehan’s blood-coated skin as if he intended to do something interesting with them, but it felt like he was everywhere. Wrapping Jehan’s ribs up in his arms. Probing the inside of Jehan’s mouth with his slender fingers.
There’s that lust again.
Jehan said hoarsely, “A failing mark, Scholar Marcelle. No consent from the patient. Very rude.”
Estiene gave him a look that was as good as a snarl. His eyes were dark as organ meat. Jehan felt the scrape of Estiene’s perfectly trimmed fingernails as his fingers slipped and tried to dig in for purchase.
And wasn’t that what Jehan had always loved about Estiene: the contradiction of him.
The good manners and the entitlement, and the way those things crashed up against one another and sparked.
The fear and the fearlessness. His expensive clothes and the ease with which he was currently endangering them with Jehan’s blood.
Jehan had been as foolish as the next eighteen-year-old when they first met, but he’d seen that.
He’d laid eyes on Estiene, so beautifully put together in a crowd of messy first-years, and had the feeling he still got on seeing a smooth iced-over puddle in winter, or an unbroken toffee sheet over custard.
He’d wanted to be the one to crack Estiene and get his tongue into whatever sweetness might be underneath.
He’d acted on that first feeling and never, not until a month ago, regretted it.
He’d smugly held the power of knowing he could crack Estiene; he’d solved the man like a puzzle over the years, finding new pieces of him in dark corners.
The sharp humour, the way he could effortlessly follow Jehan’s leaps of theory.
The way he loved his shithead father and his younger sister with a depth and steadiness that nobody could ever deserve.
Especially not Jourdain fucking Marcelle.
Jehan had hoped he too might be lucky enough to have that love undeservingly.
He’d—well. Never mind what he’d hoped. He’d been wrong.
So why couldn’t Estiene leave him the dignity of dragging his broken heart through the last month of their studies without turning up here and rubbing Jehan’s face in it?
Jehan laughed.
“And fuck you too,” he said.
He pulled away and went to wash up at the sink, and tossed a cloth to Estiene for cleaning off his hands. You didn’t leave a colleague covered in blood. Even Jehan wasn’t that much of a dick.
Estiene caught it, but didn’t say anything.
Jehan sponged himself completely clean, then took a dry cloth and began to turn his bare torso from dripping to merely damp—slowly, provokingly, because he was that much of a dick.
Estiene watched with a famished look. Another contradiction.
Jehan knew Estiene had never stopped wanting him, but had enough willpower to allow mind to overrule body.
Jehan could probably change Estiene’s mind. But he was fucked if he’d be reduced to debating his own worth. If Estiene couldn’t see it, or had weighed it against his future and found it wanting, then yes. Fuck him.
“What are you doing here,” Jehan said, flat.
“What are you doing—”
“You know what I’m doing. You saw it, I assume. No. You answer.”
“I followed you.”
“Looking like . . . ?” Jehan gestured with his cloth.
It seemed impossible that Estiene with his sullen ash-and-ice beauty and his just-been-fucked hair would be unaware of how he looked.
Of the impact he could have stepping into a place like this, imperious as a prince even when he wasn’t trying.
“You might as well have held up a sign saying Please rob me.”
“I think I was,” Estiene said. A hint of tense self-deprecation slid out. “Robbed. By the wine vendor if nothing else. But I’m a scholar, and unlike you, I’m dressed as one. I was never going to get seriously hurt.”
“No,” said Jehan. His mostly healed ribs ached as his breath, and some of his anger, collapsed within him. “They don’t hurt healers here.”
“What do you call this, then?”
So many possible answers there, most of them unhelpful. The fight’s rush was seeping out of Jehan and Estiene’s magic was still impossibly glowing within his lips. He wasn’t tired yet, but he would be soon.
Estiene had followed him here. Estiene had tried to heal him before even starting to speak.
“Fine. Sit down,” Jehan said. “I’ll tell you.”
Estiene went back to the chair. Jehan sat on the edge of the cot and told him, starting at the beginning.
He’d been going to Guion Blavot’s gym, housed in the building next to this one, even before he tested unexpectedly into the Academie, and Blavot had always been friendly, understanding, to young men without much money.
Studying at the Academie took up so much of a lad’s time, didn’t it?
Hard to find a way to earn some extra coin to put toward those fees, or be able to buy a round of drinks for one’s friends.
But being at the Academie, and spending time at the Hospital, did also present unique opportunities.
“Opportunities . . . ?” said Estiene.
“Shit I could steal,” said Jehan grimly. “Some tonics go for a lot on the black market, and Blavot has connections. So that got me through first year.”
“Stealing? You prize idiot, Jehan. What could have possibly been worth the risk?”
“Don’t start,” snapped Jehan. “Scholar Marcelle of the distinguished Marcelles, with your ears full of diamonds and gold, you wouldn’t have the first clue—”
He kept going. It was like he’d been punctured by Estiene’s blunt nails and the past had seized the opportunity to come haemorrhaging out.
Jehan’s mother had worked long hours to get by, raising him and his older sibling Emery, even before Jehan tested into the Academie.
And when he did, she’d flatly refused to let him be city-bonded; she’d taken out loans of her own, and worked extra shifts, to pay the fees up front and keep Jehan free.
Being able to quietly help pay down the loans himself—and also, yes, pay for a fucking drink every now and then—seemed worth it at the time.
“Of course I regretted it later,” he said. And couldn’t help the swipe: “I made a lot of stupid, regrettable decisions at eighteen. Didn’t you?”
Estiene’s jaw set with annoyance.
Jehan kept talking. At the end of second year, sick of the guilt and the pressure, he’d leapt at that bonded scholarship from the city of Mostau—it was a bond, but it was certainty and it was a decent job. He hadn’t told Blavot about it. He’d just said that their agreement was done.
Blavot had said, quite kindly: No, it isn’t.
Instead of Blavot reporting dutifully to the Academie that one of their scholars had approached him with stolen goods, desperate to make a sale, how about Jehan began putting his new skills to use during some night-time fights that Blavot was running?
There’d be a stipend for it, of course. Blavot was a fair man.
And it had taken another embarrassing year after that, when Jehan’s studies had progressed enough—and he’d been working for a year unsupervised, which was very against the rules for third-year scholars—for him to be similarly coerced into trying his hand at illegal enhancement work, that Jehan realised the initial theft had been unnecessary in itself.
Plenty of people could steal, if paid to steal, and Blavot’s connections ran deep and wide into other types of organised crime in Sieuxerr.
Blavot had only wanted the leverage over a future healer.