Seventeen #2
“I’m sure I didn’t heal him,” Alys finished.
“Not all the way. But the rash was gone. I don’t know—it might have been a fluke.
Ysabel wanted to know why I hadn’t told anyone I had that much magic, and I told her what I’d told the tutors, that I’ve never been able to feel the shape of my magic the way everyone else seems able to feel theirs.
Not to the point of controlling it properly.
So it doesn’t matter how much there is—there’s no point to it, is there?
And she sort of frowned at me, and then the bells rang for evening shift and Ysabel said she had to run and do something before chorale. We didn’t talk about it again.”
There. She’d spoken up. And now her exam group could decide, sensibly, that one freak episode and Alys’s unreliable opinion was not enough to risk the success of their Grand Exam.
“That’s more than I’ve done,” said Estiene. “All right. Do it.”
Alys blinked in sheer surprise. “What?”
“If you think you can, if you’ve done it before, then . . . you should be the one to try.”
Their eyes met. Alys thought about Estiene’s father, and her own reputation as a weak and inept scholar. She frankly hadn’t thought him capable of this kind of grace.
“I don’t think I can,” she said.
“Yes, you do,” he said, which was nonsense, but she understood. If you didn’t believe, you never would. Oh, Mathé’s blood. Alys chewed on a nail and her fingertip stung. The clock above the door was ticking down.
“Fine,” said Moyna. Moving them on, as if it were decided. “Tixerrant to do the healing. Marcelle, you should take monitoring. Savoye and I will heal the microvive first,” she added to Alys. “If there’s two issues then it makes sense to split the effort.”
“Agreed?” said Jehan. He glanced at Clement, who nodded.
The healing of the microvive was quick and efficient. When Alys sent diagnostic magic into Alietta, afterward, she couldn’t feel anything in the lungs. With concentration she did identify the fizzy sensation, like crawling mites, that she recognised as vermeil fever.
Phantomes were notoriously tricky. There wasn’t anything to direct your magic against. The only thing you could do was hold in your mind the idea of a healthy and normal body, and never let it falter, nor let the push of your magic halt for a moment.
Like exhaling to the final gasp of your breath to sustain a note until the end of the song.
A lot easier when you were the contact point in an array, with other healers working in harmony. But the great solo healings, for whatever reason, had been proven not to work that way. Alys vaguely remembered a lecture on the many theories as to why.
Not that they mattered in the slightest now.
Was that a ripple in the curtain, up in the examiners’ gallery? Alys imagined Dean Brodier and Healer Hilaret having a concerned discussion. If only we were allowed to intervene, they might be saying. We really shouldn’t let Tixerrant take this one. What if—
Alys swallowed a rise of acid. What if. What if.
“Tixerrant, you’re up,” said Moyna.
“Remember, only as much as you can manage,” said Jehan. Probably that was meant to be reassuring.
Alys stepped close to stand in front of Alietta, who gave Alys a look up and down which had a strong flavour of Estiene’s grandmother to it.
“Pull yourself together, Scholar,” she said.
The floor could open and swallow Alys at any time now. Really. The clock above the door could do them all a favour and explode. She wiped her palms on the sides of her robe, hummed an anchor note, and lifted her fingers to Alietta’s temples.
You have to believe or it won’t work.
Pull yourself together, Scholar.
Alys began nervously, a thin trickle only, as she did with most sorts of healing. She could feel the uselessness of that little power. It was as if the illness lurking in Alietta’s body was an endlessly deep chasm, unable to be filled.
Carefully she cracked herself wider, and pulled her magic up from the well, and let it flow exactly as she had done with Ysabel in the Hospital.
And more. And more. It wanted to flow, that was the thing, and the more Alys let out the less effort it took to summon, as if Alys had been tiptoeing downhill and now allowed herself to run.
It was fine. It was fine. When her magic ran out it would simply stop, as it had last time.
Alys thought hard about the way a body felt when diagnostics swept through and found not even the slightest fizz of a phantome, the smallest lit match of fever.
She hummed again and tied her thought to the note.
She would not think about how unsuited she was, of everyone in this room, to be doing a solo healing.
She would not think about how this was the Grand Exam and her success or failure would be judged and graded, and it wasn’t just her future, it was—
The note gulped into nothing as Alys took a huge, ragged breath.
Her chest was aglow and tight. The magic was running running running downhill through her fingers where they rested on Alietta’s temples.
Her own temples were burning in sympathy.
She would lose control of it at any moment. There was too much—
No. Think about the patient. Just get it done. Pour it all out and be done. Surely there was almost nothing left by now.
Alys opened herself entirely, and the magic roared downhill and then, impossible, an echo so loud it blocked out the world, it came back.
Alys was neither a river nor a deep well.
She was a loop. She was magic going out and chasing the vermeil down, she was in every artery and every organ and when she reached the skin and had nowhere else to go she came right back and filled herself in the same way, and bounced, and went back out—
Somewhere there were sounds happening. Maybe speech.
Alys tried vaguely to snatch at them. Then they faded, or rather they became one enormous sound that wrapped her up like a blanket.
She thought her eyes were open, but she could see only light—light so bright it almost ceased to exist, so bright that Alys herself had no space within it to exist either, only to blur, and to fade.
Nobody had ever told her that healing could be like this. That for the first time she could be free of doubt, and that it wouldn’t matter that there would be nothing left of her, nothing would ever matter again, and maybe Ysabel knew this and she did chase it all the way to the edge.
Pain came into the picture fighting Alys’s light the whole way. The magic looping back to her began to sour, as if charred. Her eyes—yes, she had eyes. The pain boiled up behind one of them. It focused her enough that for a moment she could hear again.
“—Brodier! Dean— Oh, fuck, fuck.”
The pain got worse. Alys whimpered. She had to have other parts of her body beyond this one eye, but she couldn’t feel them, and that let the panic loose.
Was she standing? Sitting? Was she even in her own body, or had she somehow torn herself asunder and vanished into Alietta’s? Who was breathing, was she breathing?
A smaller pain beneath the big one. What was that?
“Tixerrant,” someone said.
Another pain on the same spot. Another. Thud. Thud. A regular rhythm.
“Tixerrant,” again. It was a noise that cut through the noise. She wanted to follow it. “I’m going to keep this beat. Breathe with it. Two in, two out.”
Which would be all very well if Alys had lungs, but she wasn’t entirely sure she did.
Still. The thudding pain on her face was a nice distraction from the excruciating one higher up.
And she wanted the voice, which was now counting—one, two, one, two—to stay with her.
It was so much calmer than she was. For the voice, she would try, even without lungs.
It could have been a minute later, or hours, when the horse bucked and Alys jerked back into her body.
She had lungs. She had feet, and she was even standing on them.
Her magic was a bare, tingling scrape inside her.
Her head swirled with fog. Her left cheek throbbed and her right eye was afire and when she opened her eyes, squinting against the light, she saw Clement’s serious face creased with concern.
Clement taking a step back, giving Alys space.
The patient.