Nineteen #2
Alys did seem sturdier, almost her normal self, as they headed to the residence hall. But Clement had walked around for nearly a day knocked sideways from their own body and had probably seemed normal, if grief-shocked, to others.
Konrad Omeyer wasn’t in his own room, or at least didn’t respond to knocking. In the common room of that floor they found and questioned a cluster of fifth-years playing cards. Amelie Viart volunteered that she was in Konrad’s exam group, but denied any knowledge of his likely whereabouts.
“Not exactly a social creature, is he?” said Amelie. “Stomps off with his nose in the air as soon as the case is done.”
The self-defence gym was empty. Thankfully, they had more luck at the library, where they found Konrad hunched over a textbook at his carrel. As they approached, he gave them a suspicious look which wouldn’t have been out of place atop a castle wall. Archers and fire-mages at the ready.
However, Clement and Alys were an unusual enough pair, and Alys’s bloodshot eye dramatic enough, that healer curiosity clearly won over his strong desire to tell them to piss off, and he followed them to the only empty group study room on the floor.
“What?” he demanded once the door was closed.
Clement bit back the urge to snipe at him about his bedside manner, glanced at Alys to see if she wanted to explain—she looked worse again, tight-lipped and withdrawn—and then launched into it.
Or tried to. The bloody geas.
At first Konrad thought that they were trying to compare notes about the day’s exam case, and told them where to shove that idea.
Clement sighed and came at it sideways, stumbling around the concept and ending— “We think what happened to you, happened to Alys.”
“On a case like that?” Konrad said. Contempt curled his lip. “I’m surprised the rest of you let the array get that out of hand.”
Alys said nothing, but darted a speaking look at Clement, whose heart hiccupped in their chest. A case like that. Konrad would never ask that question if his group, too, had been asked to attempt a vermeil healing. Or any kind of healing that was remotely similar.
They must be doing different cases than everyone else. Alys had been right.
“Brodier’s one of our examiners,” said Clement. “She saw—what happened.” The geas dried up any further details, but they’d managed to imply enough, it seemed.
“Ah,” said Konrad. “And she sent you to me?”
Clement made a noise that could have been assent.
Konrad shrugged and leaned back against the table.
He was tall, broad, and stiff-postured enough that this was like a plank being leaned against a wall.
“Mathé’s grace I’ll be graduated, finally, by the end of the week, so I suppose it doesn’t matter if we talk about it now.
Fine. But I doubt the clinical situations are comparable.
No offence, Tixerrant, but I’ve a great deal more magic than you do, and I assume the damage was .
. . commensurate.” Discomfort shadowed his expression for the first time.
“You’re clearly well enough to be walking around and making decisions, which is a lot more than I was in the aftermath. ”
“That’s just it,” said Clement. “We think Alys has a lot of magic. Probably more than you,” they added, more out of a desire to avenge Alys’s honour than outright honesty.
Konrad’s eyebrows were a study in scepticism. Alys told Konrad what she’d told the rest of them about her uncooperative magic. The obvious effort of speaking clearly and at length had her fiddling with her cuffs and pushing back those wisps of golden hair where they fell over her forehead.
“Wait, stop, shut up,” said Konrad, over Alys’s valiant attempt to explain how her pool of potential magic felt, and why by third year she’d stopped trying to control all of it in favour of using it in tiny, safe doses.
Clement’s chest felt like a blunt blade was trying to part the tissue planes there.
Ysabel should have done more. She shouldn’t have left Alys to carry it alone, believing herself useless and beyond help.
Alys stopped talking at once at the interruption.
“Have some fucking manners, Omeyer,” said Clement, but Konrad ignored them. The plank unleaned from the wall. Konrad stepped close to Alys, whose hand closed around her own wrist.
Konrad did at least have the basic healer decency not to touch without permission. He pointed at Alys’s temple.
“What was that?”
When Clement looked closer, they could see it too: artificer-light catching on the pale oval there on Alys’s temple, the size of a large thumbprint, hidden under a loop of braid which had been pushed askew by her constant fiddling.
Any scholar would recognise that scar: the mark of a course of repeated healing delivered in childhood, when the body held its damage differently.
It must have been a long course for the mark to show up on Alys’s fair skin.
“The laughing pale,” said Alys.
Mathé’s spark. That was one of the rarer blood diseases; Clement had seen only a single case when attached to the children’s ward.
To diagnostic magic, it had felt like the bones were stuffed with sticky, stifling, rotten wool.
It was fatal unless it was picked up early and the child was lucky.
One could argue that living in Sieuxerr, close to the Hospital’s specialist healers—and with the Tixerrant name to press heavily on the scales of priority—was a sort of luck.
To heal it completely required long, gruelling sessions.
The child Clement had seen had whimpered incessantly through his, while two nurses held the boy down and the healer with their umber sash kept their mouth pressed into a line of concentration and reflected pain for the half hour of the treatment.
“Ah,” said Konrad again. Now he looked at Alys differently, and it was a look Clement recognised from Ysabel. He smelled the possibility of an interesting case report. “You never thought that— No. You wouldn’t know the story, I suppose.”
“What story?” said Alys. A hint of annoyance had leaked into her tone.
Konrad’s parents were Fenehafen; the story was one from the myth-histories of the northern region where his father was from, about a young royal who developed the laughing pale as an infant, and was taken to Sieuxerr and healed by Mathé’s own apprentices.
It was thought the royal line’s magical gift had missed him, because he manifested his magic nearly a decade later than the usual age.
By that time the court had its own healer, whose theory was that the dampening of poisonous blood cells had also dampened the prince’s magic, sending it into hiding.
“Why don’t we know about this?” asked Clement. The idea was fascinating: a kind of delayed magical puberty. “I’ve never come across it in a textbook.”
“I presume because it’s a rare disease, rarer to survive, and even rarer to overlap with the patient being a mage?
” Konrad said impatiently. “I wasn’t even sure it was a true story.
There’s a song-cycle about it. But the way you were describing how it felt, your magic suddenly bubbling up when you were twenty and being more than you could handle—that’s in the story. The prince sings about it for ages.”
Alys had some of that polite, overwhelmed fuzziness to her again, as if she wanted to go and blink at a wall for a while. Clement said hastily, “Thank you, I suppose, but we did come here to help Alys with recovering from almost burning out.”
“Yes. Right. Well, I suppose if you do have that much magic, then it might be . . . similar.”
“What did happen to you?” Clement asked.
Konrad’s surliness had been swept away by curiosity and the pleasure of holding an audience. Now it all clouded back again. He looked Clement right in the eyes. “I’d tell you to go and ask Ysabel, but I hear we can’t do that now.”
Clement bit the inside of their cheek.
“Ysabel?” said Alys. “What did she have to do with it?”
Konrad said, grimly, “Everything.”
As he told them the story, Clement had the sense of two arrogances at war in him: a long-smouldering anger against Ysabel for what she’d apparently done to him, alongside a reluctance to admit that he, shining star of his cohort and powerful mage, had been manipulated by a scholar two years his junior.
Which was what had happened. Clement could recognise that.
Ysabel had convinced Konrad to try a new technique, only just published in one of the lesser journals, which included a second healer in one of the traditionally solo healings—the one for Peizerat’s tremor—and required a great amount of power from the primary mage.
She’d made it clear she didn’t think anyone else would be able to do it; she’d always admired Konrad, she said, because he had enough magic not to be afraid of pushing boundaries. She wanted to be like that herself.
Konrad had agreed.
“I don’t remember what happened after we started the healing,” Konrad said.
One hand had clenched hard in his robe. “I woke up in a private room in the Hospital, feeling like I’d been crushed under a building and scraped up from the wreckage with muddy trowels.
The patient was fine, Mathé’s grace. And Ysabel disentangled herself from the array when it started to go wrong.
She’d fetched Dean Brodier—and Brodier was more decent about it than she could have been, only scolded us a bit about the limitations of scholars.
And she and my treating team agreed to keep the details quiet from the rest of the Academie’s big-robes, so we didn’t get in trouble for stepping way over the line.
I suspect the brilliant Ysabel was the one Brodier cared most about protecting.
” A hint of venom on Ysabel’s name. “So I had to put up with knowing people were inventing appalling rumours about me.”
“How dreadful,” murmured Alys.
“And Ysabel was fine. I was the one left having vomiting fits at random, and bleeding from my gums, and barely able to use my magic for months.”