Nineteen #5
“The promise to help, I suppose.” Alys’s cheeks pinkened as she turned her gaze briefly, searingly, to meet Clement’s.
“We all had—have—a lot going on, as scholars. I’d never thought that it was anyone’s responsibility to help me.
And it’s not as if I did anything but try my very best to hide it.
But now I wonder what kind of help she might have given if she were still here.
Whether it’d have made a difference to .
. .” A loose, watery gesture that seemed to encompass all of Alys.
“She’d have meant it,” Clement said, helplessly. “The apology, the promise—all of it. She always did.”
It was a horrible thought: that Alys had been carrying all that power around, uncontrolled and miserable with it, and not a single one of the healers who’d taught her had ever noticed, efforts to hide it notwithstanding.
Yes. They all had a lot going on. There were healers at the Hospital who probably hadn’t had an unbroken night’s sleep since they’d first entered the Academie.
“But,” added Clement, “Ysabel did love secrets for their own sake. She could have told someone who might have helped you much earlier, and she didn’t. You deserved better.”
Alys smiled. Clement was so full, so turbulent with emotions: that fresh grief, a dash of disloyalty, giddying desire at how the smile lit Alys like a window—and shame that they, too, had spent the last five years taking Alys Tixerrant at face value.
They slid the letter back across the table, dodging a spill of berry juice and sugar grains. “She would have meant the last bit, too.”
You should be something enormous and extraordinary, Tixerrant.
Ysabel was not perfect—had not been perfect. But her belief in herself as extraordinary had never stopped her from believing in the potential of others to be equally so. To collect five people and channel them purposefully toward a better future was an extremely Ysabel thing to do.
And that was what this was, Clement was becoming sure. That was the heart of this mystery, even if the skeleton and most of the flesh was still obscure.
Alys tucked the letter away. “Come with me,” she said. “Now we’ve eaten, I can thank you properly.”
She was already standing and turning to lead the way, so thankfully she didn’t see whatever Clement’s face did as several deeply inappropriate things tumbled through it. Spirits curse that bloody painting.
The actual thank-you was, in the end, almost as good.
Alys led them into a grand room which had the desks and crammed bookshelves of a study, but also a huge piano, a standing harp, several cases and boxes which seemed likely to contain other instruments, and a handful of music stands like black reeds rising from the floor.
Along with a lot of sheet music, the room contained a baffling mixture of historical textbooks, which Alys explained were spillover from her father’s personal library, and rather lowbrow fiction.
Two whole rows were filled with the Chambely series; Clement had only ever read a handful of them, and had no idea there were so many.
“I was obsessed with those as a girl,” said Alys. “Everything happened for such good reasons in books. Everything turned out well.”
The eponymous Healer Chambely was indeed alive and thriving at the end of each book, even if he had gone through far more strife than seemed likely in a lifetime, let alone three hundred pages.
Clement, finally, let themself go over to the piano.
If it had been closed, they might not have dared open it.
And they didn’t sit. But they couldn’t help laying their fingers on the gleaming keys and pressing down.
The room had superb acoustics, of course.
The chord shimmered. Clement took their hand back.
“Is it out of tune?” said Alys.
“No.”
“Will you play something?”
The greedy urge to do so rose immediately. Followed at once by the realisation that this was the thank-you, framed as a polite request for a favour. The piano keys were very white in the sunlight, and free of dust. There was no music on the stand.
“How did you know I can play?”
“A guess,” said Alys. “You have perfect pitch. You anchored the arrays for us in the exam chamber, and you sing like someone who anchors a section. And sometimes you—” Alys demonstrated, an absent motion of fingers dancing on her own thighs, recognisable as someone marking out a piece on keys.
And sometimes Clement rubbed their arm, as they were doing now, and Alys had almost certainly noticed that too, despite how little Clement wanted to be seen.
They took a seat. The piano stool was made of matching wood, cushioned in red.
This was a beautiful and lonely room. Clement and Alys were from different worlds; but they were both townies who were never supposed to be healers, and they both orbited their own bodies with unease.
Clement wondered if anyone ever played these instruments, with Alys living on campus.
“I’m very out of practice,” they said, but didn’t wait to hear Alys’s reassurance, because the keys were beckoning.
Adala had said once that Clement had won a double prize: the Ferue disdain for the flesh, along with a tendency to slide gently sideways from a world that was, for eighteen years of their life, a metal spring of danger quietly and constantly coiled.
Things were better now. Breathing helped. Candles didn’t.
Music certainly might, Clement thought.
The piano was in perfect tune.