Eighteen
Are you hearing what he’s saying between the lines?
“No, despite what the textbooks say, you can kill people if you’re not careful, because a heart’s too stupid to know whether you’re telling it to slow down to heal a tachycardia or to allow a block to take hold.
But shh, we can’t let anyone know that.” Seriously? ?
OBVIOUSLY we can’t. No matter how rare it is, can you IMAGINE if people started believing that healers can use magic to kill?
Not to mention, do YOU fancy being bonded to a foreign court and then turning up and being told you’ve actually been hired as an assassin?
My mum told me when I tested into the Academie. We all know and we don’t say anything.
—Margin notes in two sets of handwriting on a page of lecture notes. From the archives of the Academie Sieuxerr, authors unknown
There were enough people fussing over Alys already. Moyna hung back, rubbing her hands shakily together, thinking about what had just happened. About what she’d felt in Alietta’s body, and what Brodier and Hilaret had said.
The whole thing had seemed to begin well enough. Alys had stood there performing the healing on Alietta.
And then Alys had started to shake. And then whimper. And then, after an age of uncertainty where they all exchanged horrified glances and tried to get Alys to tell them what was happening, and Alietta’s expression went from tense to outright concerned as her cheeks erupted in the vermeil rash—
Alys’s hands had jerked back from Alietta’s temples. And she’d simply stood there, shaking violently in a way that was sickeningly unlike any kind of seizure that Moyna had ever seen.
Clement was the first to act. They took Alys in hand, if slapping rhythmically at her cheek and talking intensely into her face counted.
Moyna had found herself and Estiene stepping up to Alietta at the same moment, from the same impulse: to see what had happened—what had gone wrong—and to see if it was fixable.
You could feel the recent effects of another healer’s magic, if you went looking for it in the body. Not enough to tell what they’d done, but at least enough to tell where it had been directed.
Moyna hadn’t had to go looking at all. The first tentative push of diagnostics had thrown back a surging, roiling golden storm of magic.
It didn’t hurt, and thankfully didn’t seem to be hurting Alietta.
But it was there, and it was everywhere.
Moyna had absolutely no idea what it meant or what to do with it.
She’d exchanged a look of bewilderment with Estiene.
Brodier and Hilaret, when the bell rang and they hurried down into the room, had done the same thing.
After the first muttered oaths of surprise, they’d held on to Alietta’s wrists for longer.
Presumably they were checking the extent to which any healing had taken place, which they’d have done anyway in the normal course of things, so they could properly judge how well the group had performed on this case.
The examiners, too, had exchanged a grim glance.
“The sheer amount of it . . .” said Brodier. “That’s as close to the backwash from burnout as we’ll ever see in the living, I think. Tixerrant must have been nearly as close as Omeyer—” She stopped abruptly, as if the memory tasted bad.
“What in Mathé’s name is a scholar of that strength doing walking around without us all knowing about her?
” said Hilaret. He directed a look at where Alys was crouched, mostly hidden by Clement’s body.
“No wonder she volunteered. She might even have been able to complete the healing entirely if she hadn’t lost her grip on it. ”
“Our sincere apologies, Madame,” Brodier said to Alietta. “We’ll take you back to the Hospital and set things to rights.”
A second attempt at a difficult, finicky, not-quite-necessary healing was more than most patient cases for the Grand Exam would be granted, Moyna was sure.
But this woman was clearly someone of more importance than a butcher or a scared Matorran visitor.
As Hilaret led her away, she was asking in grudging tones if the girl was all right.
Moyna had no idea if the girl was all right, even though Brodier—her harried expression carved even deeper, today—seemed content to take Clement at their word and leave them all be. Alys looked like a crushed butter-blossom at the prospect of having failed the case.
Oh, the irony if they failed the Grand Exam and it had nothing to do with Moyna at all.
“Are we going to—” Jehan waved a hand. “Meet? Discuss—everything? We have to get out of here to let them reset the chamber, anyway.”
Moyna was the first out of the external door. Her lungs expanded gladly. She stepped around a puddle on the path and nearly collided with the hovering messenger in the green Berthelmi’s uniform.
“Don’t tell me,” said Moyna, who was prepared to make a solid guess on this one. Bloody Ysabel and her games. “You’re looking for Scholar Alys Tixerrant.”
The messenger handed the letter over with a small huff, waited for Moyna to crack it open, and then hurried away; clearly they’d kept him waiting, again.
Alys was up and walking on her own by now. One of her eyes was all blood from corner to corner, like you saw in elderly people sometimes after they sneezed too hard. Subconjunctival haemorrhage. When Moyna held out the letter she only blinked at it as if it were a difficult logic puzzle.
“I’ll just hold on to it until we’re sitting down, then,” said Moyna.
Jehan suggested the knocking room again. Clement took a long look at Alys and suggested somewhere involving fewer stairs, and they ended up beneath a tree on the entrance lawn of the western lecture hall. The grass was summer-lush and not too damp. It was like a very strained picnic.
Alys opened Ysabel’s letter and read it in silence, squinting as if she had a headache. Probably she did. Probably she was lucky to still have the eye, if she’d been spiralling toward true burnout; it might easily have burst in the socket of her skull.
Alys’s fingers whitened on the paper. She took a deep, mustering breath and looked—not composed, but close to it. Effortful.
And then she burst into gasping tears.
“Uh,” said Estiene.
“Alys?” said Clement, who hadn’t taken their eyes off her.
“Sh’fine,” Alys sobbed. She held the letter out to Moyna with the hand not currently pressed over her eyes.
Moyna took that as permission to read it aloud.
Like the other letters, it was a description of the solo healing process for vermeil fever, followed by .
. . ah. Something more personal, this time.
It was a frank apology for not having helped Alys, or encouraged her to seek help from senior healers, after their private session of almost-healing vermeil on the Hospital wards, once Ysabel realised how much power and potential Alys had stuck beneath her anxious inability to wield it.
It finished, But I knew, you see, that you of anyone would be able to tackle this case in particular.
Come and find me at the end of the week, when we’re all able to talk about it, and I’ll do better. I’ll find someone to do better. I promise.
And in return you have to promise me you won’t go off and do small healings for the rich. You should be something enormous and extraordinary, Tixerrant. Come and work at the Hospital with me and we’ll find out what that is.
Shit. Moyna might have started crying too, if it were her, and if she were the sort of person inclined to tears.
And she wasn’t the only one looking at Alys curiously in the silence that followed.
It wasn’t unheard of for a metamage to misjudge someone’s level of power, but everyone knew that Alys had barely scraped past the threshold. That was a lot of wrong to be.
“I don’t suppose anyone’s read any amazing obscure papers on how to treat . . . not-quite burnout?” Clement said. “Or at least what we should be looking out for?”
Shakes of the head all around, even from Jehan and Estiene.
“Maybe we should get you to the Hospital after all, Alys,” Clement said.
Alys made a wet noise of protest with clear overtones of It’s not that bad, really.
“What’s a junior in the courtyard clinic going to know that we don’t? Brodier mentioned Konrad Omeyer,” said Moyna. “He’s the only other person I can think of who got close to burnout and survived it. You should ask him what helped.”
Clement nodded, clearly grateful for something solid to seize on to. It struck Moyna that watching that happen to Alys, when a similar thing might still have happened to Ysabel, must have been horrifying. And yet Clement had stepped up and helped while the rest of them were still dithering.
The next silence was that of everyone realising that Alys usually got them started, in these mystery-solving discussions.
She clearly wasn’t up to doing so now. Clement was distracted by their concern for Alys, and Jehan—the other person who’d shown himself keen to take the lead—was frowning at his knuckles as if listening to an entirely different conversation taking place in his own head.
Moyna sighed inwardly and lifted herself higher onto her hands, but before she could speak, Estiene did.
“So it seems that Ysabel definitely planned to be here, and alive, at the end of the week,” he said, gesturing to the letter. “I think we can take suicide off the table for good.”
“And what you said last night seems right, Alys,” said Moyna.
“Ysabel knew exactly who’d be in this exam group and what cases we’d be doing.
I knew you’d be able to tackle this case?
Did Ysabel choose our group, instead of Brodier?
Did she do it with Brodier? And why would Brodier tell Ysabel that the exam had to be rigged for Estiene to score well? ”
“This can’t just be about me,” said Estiene.
“Behold, some acknowledgement that you’re not the centre of the world,” said Moyna. “No—shut up. I agree. But what the fuck else is going on?”
“I’d say that this is somehow Ysabel’s special secret project,” said Jehan, “if it weren’t for the fact that I have no idea how putting us through five different exam cases to everyone else makes for a groundbreaking research thesis.”
“And Brodier said that Ysabel’s topic was echo headaches,” said Clement.
“Every case we’ve done so far has involved phantomes or their aftereffects.
You can get echo headaches after phantomes, but it’s hardly a vital association.
Still. I do think Ysabel’s project is important,” they added.
“I haven’t found her research notebook.”
“So if Brodier was lying . . .” said Moyna.
“Why?” said Estiene. “Yes, if she lied about the topic, that’s suspicious.
And if she and Ysabel were putting our exam together, then they’d have a reason to be in our exam chamber together the night before.
” A chill chased over Moyna’s skin. She hadn’t thought of that.
“But why kill her golden chance, when she’s at risk of losing her position?
Ysabel dead makes things worse for her. Saige still has a better motive.
Even Thumery or his wife, I suppose, if Ysabel really was messing around with him. ”
Why, why. It was the key question in all of this, wasn’t it?
Moyna said, “I know the last thing we need now is more possible threads to untangle, but I’ve been thinking more about what I told the artificers yesterday.
” She nodded at Clement. “If a healer is killed then their murderer gets the death penalty. But if a healer were killed by another healer, they’d be life-bonded instead.
That’s workforce. And a lot of money for the city, over time. ”
“Now Alys has you thinking in terms of stage-plays as well,” said Estiene. “Murder must be because of sex or money, is that it?”
“And I’ve given us a way it could be sex, and now I’m giving us a way for it to be money,” snapped Moyna. “What are you contributing, Estiene?”
“For that to be the reason—you mean someone might try to frame a healer for murder?” said Clement. They frowned. “The victim wouldn’t need to be Ysabel at all, in that case. And if it’s about workforce . . .”
“Depends if the point is the specific person getting framed,” said Jehan. He let out a long groan and stretched his legs out in front of him. “This is getting convoluted. I don’t know. Maybe it all went wrong. There was supposed to be an obvious suspect, and the killer fucked it up somehow.”
Moyna wanted to groan too. “Maybe if the gendarmes were actually investigating, there’d be obvious clues leading to someone.”
“We haven’t found them,” said Estiene, waspish.
“We’re not exactly good at this!” said Moyna. “Or haven’t you noticed that?”
Alys, who’d been silent for some time, cleared her throat. She was sitting very upright, hands tight in her lap.
“Then we start where they would start,” said Alys, hoarse.
“All right, everyone please stop looking at me like that.” She touched a loop of braid that fell over one temple, as if making sure it was in place.
“I’m— I’ll be fine. If we do agree that someone killed Ysabel, and we can’t figure out the why yet, then let’s go back to how.
Estiene, you were the one who got the best look at her body.
You said something about—she’d hit her head? ”
“There was blood. Not a lot, but . . . and I could feel the dent in her skull.”
“Lots of things can dent a skull,” said Jehan, “if you swing them hard enough.”
“Any other broken bones?” asked Moyna. She tried to remember what Ysabel’s body had looked like. On her back? No, her front. She remembered seeing the blood too.
“I wasn’t exactly doing a trauma survey.” Estiene sounded more tired than snappy now. “She was dead. I knew that as soon as I tried diagnostics.”
“The killer might have tried to make it look like the fall killed her,” suggested Alys. “But killed her first. Magically or otherwise.”
That shut everyone up for a moment. They’d looped around from someone trying to make it look like a crime committed by a healer, to a healer trying to make it look otherwise.
And there wasn’t a scholar at the Academie who hadn’t sat through the lectures on the sorts of treatments which ran a risk of accidental harm and thought, in the small stressed hours of the night, about what their magic could do, if they ever held the desire to end a life in their mind with the same strength that it took to hold the image of a healthy, healed body.
If the song was not of life, but of death.
“Everyone we’ve suspected so far is a healer,” Clement said finally.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jehan. “There’s no way to tell, even if we were right back in the exam chamber two days ago. No diagnostics on a corpse, and no way to check if someone else has used healing magic on them either.”
A cold sensation trickled down Moyna’s spine and settled into a pool of sickly excitement.
“Um,” she said. “Actually. There . . . might be.”