Seventeen
A more disturbing piece of news: Do you remember little Coubertin?
I heard from Liza that they’d had word from the summer palace of one of the Resée princes, where he was working.
He’s in the flame, I’m afraid. Sounds as though he burned out trying to save one of the royal children from clacket-fever.
The details were rather grisly. Hopefully they had a mage within a day’s ride with some control over temperature, so the body can make it back to Sieuxerr for teaching.
Not that one can learn the anatomy of the heart, if the heart’s exploded within the rib cage.
—Letter in the archives of the Academie Sieuxerr, signed “R. Honoré”
I thought you’d planned an early night,” said Moyna. “Did you all go off and get drunk?”
It was true that for once, Moyna looked the most lively of them all as they waited outside the door to Chamber Two.
Alys had had a restless night, constantly woken by the thunderstorm; no doubt it showed, despite the tea she’d poured into herself at breakfast. Clement was smudged around the eyes and rubbing at their arm again.
And Estiene and Jehan had clearly found the time to bite some more chunks out of each other, because they were back to avoiding each other’s gaze, sullen and drawn in a way that was similar enough to be funny under other circumstances.
Not funny now, given that this group had to pull together for both three more Grand Exam cases and the ongoing investigation into everything to do with Ysabel’s death. Things had seemed fine between them all last night. Or as fine as they could be.
Alys was chewing her nails. She shoved that hand into her pocket.
“Sleep is for summer,” said Jehan, brittle.
“Mathé’s bones, you’re a mess,” Moyna muttered, but she went and dug an amiable elbow into his side. Jehan leaned his own elbow on her head.
Sleep was for summer, but summer was here.
Everything smelled of clean stone and flowers, and there were puffs of gentle clouds reflected in the leftover puddles from the night before.
Alys wanted to go and stand in the centre of the quad with her arms stretched out and her head tilted back, and breathe until her lungs were lined with it all.
“What do we think they’ll give us today?” she said. “There hasn’t been a mixed—”
The bell rang.
She’d been about to say a mixed case, diagnostics and healing both, and that was indeed what they were given.
The patient was a middle-aged woman with hectic cheeks and a wretched dry cough, her hair in four braids and her ears showing holes where multiple ear ornaments had been removed.
Nearly as many as Estiene wore. She looked vaguely familiar, and her eyes paused on Alys as she looked around the exam group.
Her name was Alietta; she provided it along with the strong impression that she was not used to upstart young people, scholars or not, addressing her as anything but Madame.
She spoke like someone who might be friends with Alys’s mother.
Clement read, “This patient has had a fever for five days, and had a rash across her torso for the first two of those. Use diagnostic magic to reach a diagnosis and determine a treatment plan, and then provide treatment to the extent that your group is able.”
“To the extent that we’re able?” said Estiene. “Not a good sign.”
“It could be,” Alys pointed out. “It means we’re unlikely to fail if we can’t heal her all the way.
” A rash and a fever, and now a cough. Not very specific.
But if the hint was that it was something potentially unhealable even in a five-person array, then that narrowed it down to some more serious or at least irritating things.
“It could be more than one diagnosis, too,” Jehan said. “The recent fever on top of something else.”
“No point guessing too much at this point.” Moyna looked around. “Any objections if I . . . ?”
Alietta sat upright on the wooden chair with Moyna’s fingertips at her temples and her lips pressed thin.
Her poise had shifted to an air of icy, long-suffering impatience, as if she were sitting through a tedious speech in a language she didn’t understand.
Not impressed at being recruited as an exam case instead of being promptly healed and sent home, Alys would bet.
And that suspicious air was familiar to all of them by now.
Plenty of townies who disliked healers or declaimed them as plague-omens still turned up at the Hospital expecting their services.
Moyna made a face almost at once. “Microvive of some kind at the lung bases, but I don’t think that’s everything. That feels like it’s either just beginning or on the way out, and not enough to cause those symptoms. Jehan might be right.”
Jehan took a turn at diagnostics next. Then Estiene, who took longer than the others. His sullenness smoothed out as he stood with his eyes closed and only the slightest pinch of concentration between his brows.
“Ah,” he said finally. “Got it.”
“Well?” said Clement, when Estiene didn’t continue.
Estiene said in an encouraging sort of way, “Fever ongoing on the fifth day, but the rash is gone after two.”
Alys felt stupid. The others were all frowning thoughtfully, and it was Jehan who said, “Oh. But I thought the rash was usually—”
“Usually on the face, but not always.” Estiene, in triumph, was less smug and more eager to teach.
“And it’s late in the year for it, but— Madame Alietta, can I ask—” And he hooked out of the woman a story of recently hosting some relatives who’d travelled from the northern border of Rese, where the mountainous cold clung to the winter phantomes for longer than the rest of the country.
“Another phantome,” said Clement. “This year’s cases seem to be running along a theme.”
Alys nearly spoke, then didn’t. If their exam group was doing a different set of cases than everyone else, then they probably shouldn’t betray their awareness of that fact to their examiners.
“I’m diagnosing a moderate case of vermeil fever with a secondary microvive pneumonia contributing to the cough,” said Estiene formally. “Has anyone else seen an actual attempt at healing vermeil?”
“Never,” said Moyna. “Isn’t it usually not worth the magic it takes? Everyone recovers from it eventually, and healing it is one of the five great solo techniques.”
“Six,” said Estiene. “There was a paper—”
“We saw it done once. Winter term this year,” Jehan said.
His hand twitched in illustration toward Estiene.
“Most people recover, but it was an older woman who was having sinistre-construct treatment to her heart valves at the same time, so they thought it might cause a reaction and kill her. And her husband had just bought the Hospital a nice new fit-out for the east wing’s foyer,” he added dryly.
“It worked?” said Clement. “Who’d they get to do it? Danisy?”
“Dauvillier,” said Jehan. “It’s not their specialty, one of the phantomists had to talk them through the technique, but there’s no one else with that sheer depth of power. Took over an hour and it was just them.”
Alys’s throat had tightened at the word vermeil and stayed tight. She’d watched that case too. They’d had to carry Dauvillier out of the theatre, afterward; half the junior healers and scholars in the gallery had been near-swooning themselves, at how brave and magical and handsome they were.
Alys was now almost sure that Ysabel Caudotte was responsible for Alys being in this exam group. Somehow. If Alys didn’t speak up, she had the horrid sense that she’d be betraying the dead.
“Um,” she said. And then said it louder, as none of the others had noticed. They were already trying to determine which of them had the most interventionist power, in order to fulfil the exam case by providing treatment to the extent that they were able.
“Tixerrant?” Clement said. They waved Estiene and Moyna quiet.
Alys took a breath and explained. Ysabel had been at that vermeil healing as well; sitting next to Alys, in fact, as they were in the same ward rotation.
Several cases of vermeil had broken out in the Hospital.
It wasn’t uncommon in winter. And afterward Ysabel had seized Alys’s arm and said, Let’s give it a try, shall we?
Alys had been pleased to be asked. It was clear that what Ysabel wanted was an audience, not a partner.
Ysabel had tried out Dauvillier’s technique on a bemused man with the classic rash who was in the Hospital for something entirely different.
Alys had hooked her own magic into the patient’s pulse and felt it, the way Ysabel’s magic pushed and shoved and fought like a worker trying to build a wall of sandbags in the face of a surging river-flood.
It had been a good effort. But not enough.
Now you try, Ysabel had said afterward, breathing hard and stretching her fingers. Just to see what it’s like.
It wasn’t an exam. No one was watching. And there was no hope that Alys would succeed where Ysabel had failed; they both knew that. So Alys had felt quite cheerful and calm about setting her own fingers to the patient’s temples and letting the well of her magic, for once, open and flow as it would.
It had flowed, and flowed, for much longer than either Alys or Ysabel had expected.
Alys had waited to come up across the natural edge of her ability.
Most people described feeling faint and tired like a piece of clockwork winding down.
For Alys it had always been more sudden than that, like being rudely bucked from a horse.