Nineteen #3
Alys blanched. Konrad sharpened, as if he’d only just heard what he’d said and the bitter tone in which he’d said it. He realised the handful of fabric he’d been gripping.
“So that’s what happened to me, Savoye. Not exactly the stuff of song-cycles, is it? And there’s no one simple cure for it. Like the bloody serrage. But this at least got me back on my feet in the early days.”
He proceeded to talk them through a complex variation on a healing technique that was usually used for heatstroke.
“Heatstroke?” said Clement. Not entirely disbelieving, but .
. . wanting to be sure, before they went off and tried a technique on someone—not just someone, Alys Tixerrant—suffering from an illness this unusual.
And this week had already delivered pointed reminders about how magic didn’t play nicely with some medical conditions.
Burnout was a magical injury; surely the wrong magic, poorly applied, could make things worse?
“I didn’t realise you were asking so you could criticise the theory,” said Konrad. Then, relenting at Clement’s look, “I wouldn’t have thought of it either. But it worked.”
Clement made him go over it again. It made more sense, once they visualised it in detail.
This was magic dealing gently with a body which had been sent wildly astray from the idea of normal, overstretched and depleted.
And Clement had only done a simple pneumonia healing, split with Moyna, so far today; they had plenty of magic left to give.
Alys thanked Konrad with more grace than Clement felt he deserved, and he kicked them out with no grace at all so that he could go back to his books.
“Let’s find somewhere more comfortable than this study room,” said Clement.
“My room?” Alys suggested.
A small hiccup of combined yes please and oh no happened in Clement’s throat. They cleared it self-consciously. “I have another idea.”
Tucked away between the second-year residence hall and the groundskeepers’ shed was an overgrown area that had once been a tiny private garden for a hallmaestre.
Now it was the private garden of some hopping brown birds, a lot of thick unkempt grass and a tangle of unspectacular bushes, and the original statue of Mathé that had been replaced by the much more imposing one gracing the Academie’s main approach.
This Mathé was made of stone instead of bronze, wore a belted shift instead of the anachronistic houppelande gown, and had no apprentices behind them.
They were long-limbed and calm, with a quizzical smile.
The statue was life-size and seated, and had been stuck on a low wall that was nonetheless taller than the wall originally made for the statue; Mathé’s feet dangled and they listed to the left.
Clement always smiled to see them.
It was quiet here, in the heart of the Academie, far from the surrounding streets.
Alys folded herself down onto the grass and took a deep breath that looked just as much like arming a castle wall as Konrad’s hostility had.
She was nervous. Nervous to the point of vibrating tension.
No wonder. Her last contact with healing magic had been a disaster, and now Clement was going to push more into her.
So Clement knelt down beside her and offered, as casually as they could, to start by showing Alys some breathing exercises.
“One of Ysabel’s mothers taught them to me,” they said. “She used to do a lot of work with people whose bodies . . . hold on to the things that have happened to them.”
Alys considered this. She did not ask if used to meant before the serrage. She did not ask why Clement might have needed such a thing in the first place—what Clement’s body might be holding on to.
“Of course,” she said. “You got me to breathe in the exam chamber, didn’t you? And that helped.”
And so, for a while, they breathed together. The warmth of Alys’s hand lingered in Clement’s own palm from where they guided her to feel the swell of inhalation. Clement counted aloud to begin with. Then they fell silent.
They closed their eyes. Summer air. Smell of dirt and grass. Grief, grief, like an invisible wound.
They felt themself in their body and stayed there.
Clement had grown up being told, then at the Academie taught, that bodies were something you could have clear mastery over.
Some people even disbelieved in the animating spark, which left a body when the body died and couldn’t sustain it.
For a while Clement had tried to believe that—they’d tried to find the vastest possible opposition to their parents and their own old beliefs.
Perhaps a body was all you ever were.
Perhaps a body was the least of what you were.
They were days away from becoming a fully-fledged healer and they still didn’t know which was true.
Or if both were, somehow. The thing lying on the floor in the Rondelle had not been Ysabel, but it had been the only version left of Ysabel that could be seen, and touched, and—avenged.
Clement wanted to shudder at the thought of Moyna, who was going to the bodykeeping room to deliberately put her hands and her magic on death.
No. Breathe.
Breath was not magic. When you imagined it flowing through your body, it didn’t return to you in a harmonic glow of information.
Somehow, still, it forced your awareness into crevices and said: Here you are.
All of you. Even the bits that have been hurt, or are hurting still, and the bits you’ve never felt particularly connected to.
Clement had grown up amidst a strangling vine of Ferue belief: the body considered as no more than temporary, disposable rags.
The importance of the great fire that was the source and destination of all sparks; and the importance of bringing that fire into daily life as both reward and punishment, both reminder and balm for the internal spark.
To fully inhabit one’s body again, Adala Caudotte had told Clement, after years of being forced out of it both by inflicted belief and instinctive response, was a long and difficult journey.
“I’m ready,” Alys said.
Clement opened their eyes. Alys shifted her knees, angling toward Clement, and Clement took hold of Alys’s closest wrist.
“I’ll do diagnostics first. And then exactly as Konrad described it,” they said. “Stop me at once if you need to.”
Alys nodded. Beneath Clement’s grip her tendons shifted. Her lovely mouth relaxed.
Clement gathered their magic, which felt strong and flexible within them. It usually did after breathing that way. They hummed their chosen note, a round, warm, comforting C that seemed to fit both the technique itself and the summery green-brown of the garden.
Their magic went out into Alys like unfurling leaves.
Nothing about this should have felt unusual.
In five years of increasing responsibility on Hospital rotations, Clement had helped to heal hundreds of patients.
Maybe thousands. And scholars practised diagnostics on one another all the time, and practised healing probably more than was wise.
Clement was no different; they assumed Ysabel had saved her most ambitious excesses, her wildest experiments, to perform with other people, but the two of them had practised basic techniques as often as anyone else.
It still felt different. It felt as if the world around this garden had fallen away.
To magic, Alys’s bloodshot eye and the tissues around it throbbed with strange damage, like a glitter-headache screwed up and packed tight as a snowball around ice. Clement felt it out, winced, and left it alone.
Everywhere else was the backwash of burnout, which Clement had never felt before.
Perhaps Konrad was right and every burnout was different.
Perhaps this was specific to Alys and nobody would ever feel it again.
It was like heatstroke, a little. It had that desolate thirst, that feeling of struggling against too-thin air, but it was altogether colder and more savage.
A drain of the body’s resources this intense was usually only felt in patients who were gratefully horizontal.
Clement was surprised Alys had stayed on her feet.
Clement sang, shifted their magic’s shape, and let it begin to work.
It was a rhythmic sea-shanty of a healing, using the heartbeat to guide it.
It slid gently into the exhausted tissues and whispered of fresh life, fresh energy.
The new energy was Clement’s, but the magic coaxed Alys’s body into accepting it.
The heart beat on. Lulling. Clement wanted to exist forever in the sheer pleasure of a healing done confidently and well, with no doubt and no danger.
Their fingers lived here with Alys within the cage of them.
When they felt themself tiring, they withdrew their magic. Slowly, luxuriously; almost showing off with how light a touch they tried to leave, so that nothing would threaten the fragile new health they’d kindled in Alys’s body.
They opened their eyes. The angle of the sun dappled shadow across Alys’s golden head.
Clement couldn’t think of what to say.
Alys let out a long, shuddering sigh, and stretched.
Her cuffs fell back from her wrists and her expression went dreamy with satisfaction, and Clement needed to stop looking because this was turning into a problem.
It was impossible not to be aware of how close they were, and yet the inches between them seemed ridiculous.
What was air? What was skin? Clement’s magic knew the insides of Alys’s veins, now; it had twisted and soothed in all of Alys’s tight corners.
The heat of blood climbed Clement’s neck.
“I like this place,” said Alys. “I like that it feels like a secret. Is it another Ysabel thing?”
“No, this one’s a me thing.” Clement’s voice was rough and they felt a smile on their face. “I loved Ysabel, but after a full day of her, sometimes I needed quiet.”