Twenty
Why is everyone wringing their hands and blaming our blessed and hard-working local healers, the gifts of Mathé, when it’s all too clear what brought the serrage to the Blue City?
If we insist on opening our gates and granting residence to every greedy family of anthem larks who want to take advantage of our city’s gifts and then scurry away with our wealth, can we be surprised when they carry with them all the filth and evil of their homes?
—Letter to the Editor, published in the Sieuxerr Gazette
It was harder to run rooftops in the middle of the day.
There was far more chance of someone assuming Moyna was a thrill-seeker or criminal if they happened to glance up and see her; at least, until they saw the grey robe of the scholar, at which point they’d probably just be confused.
Or wondering if a scholar had been summoned to heal a thrill-seeker or criminal who had injured themself on the rooftops.
Nobody would impersonate a scholar. The penalties for fraudulently wearing the grey were almost as severe as those for wearing the blue.
She ran and she jumped, and her ankles were strong. The sun was less severe than it’d been the previous two days, but it was just past noon, and the lack of shade and the need to keep up momentum made Moyna sweat beneath her clothes. It felt good to be fully in her body and less in her mind.
Her childhood home was one of several slender houses sharing walls in a narrow street that took a sharp curve uphill and then another one down, shaded by balconies and laundry-lines stretched across the sky.
Many front doors were open to let the air flow, including that of Moyna’s family.
Her sixteen-year-old sister Ellyn was sprawled in the doorway, skinny bare ankles emerging from her chausses, sandals scuffing idly on the dusty stones.
She lifted her head from her book as Moyna’s shadow fell over her.
“Oh, hi.”
“You’re out from school early,” Moyna said. “Or have they moved the lunch break up?”
“We have two days off? For Mathé’s Feast?” said Ellyn. “Back to school after Lantern Night, for a whole two weeks of nothing useful before everything stops for summer. All that studying has really sizzled your brain.”
Moyna made a rude schoolyard gesture and Ellyn returned it.
Returning home tended to transform Moyna into a girl no older than Ellyn; she could feel it happen every time and still couldn’t stop it, any more than she could stop the pulse of rancid envy of her younger sister, who’d failed her own mage-testing several months ago.
Barely a breath of magic at all. And who cared?
The anthem-lark Apprices had Symon, and Moyna.
Two from three was a fair result. The unmagical Ellyn could be whatever she wanted.
“Up your flattened arse,” said Ellyn in Camarran. She switched back to Resée to say: “Symon’s inside being the favourite child, so brace yourself.”
“He can’t help it,” said Moyna.
Ellyn shrugged and looked back at her book. “They can.”
Moyna felt her face flatten into a mask as she stepped over her sister’s legs and inside. Even without Symon’s presence, she always braced herself here. She greeted Symon with congratulations for passing his second-year exams—the reason for this family lunch.
“Seeing Moyna twice in one week,” said their mother. “Rivers and bones! How spoiled we are!”
“Sure,” said Moyna.
And there went her voice, flattening to match her face. I’ll be everything you want me to be, but you can’t make me pretend to be happy.
“Come and sit. Call your sister in,” said her father, setting a basket of bread on the dining table beside a steaming tureen and the water jug: a family heirloom of etched silver, much prized.
The smell of the food gave Moyna a sharp and unwelcome stab of emotion which her parents would have been delighted about.
To them, this food was homesickness made solid, a reminder of their sacrifices and their goals and of their beloved Camar, land of rivers, where the magic-giving spirits were also the spirits of each waterway, no matter how large or small.
Moyna refused to be homesick for Camar. It was not home.
But Mathé’s blood, she’d missed mayweed soup for every moment of her five years at the Academie. Her mother made it with dried mayweed, imported at great expense, and maintained it was nowhere near as good as fresh. Moyna had never tasted different. This sweet, earthy tang was all she knew.
None of her family asked about the Grand Exam.
They knew about the proctor geas. And it was more fun for Symon to chew over his exams, knowing that they were behind him.
Ellyn pushed food around her plate and was full of deep sighs and monosyllabic replies, but that seemed to be the stage she was going through, because Moyna’s parents didn’t push it.
For a while they talked about their own work, with the detached, gossipy air of people who knew they’d be leaving soon.
Neither of them had trained as artificers, but as classical water-mages: deeply practical people who’d talk your ear off about drains, but also had a strong spiritual aspect to their magic and how it connected them to the world.
So they weren’t involved in the artificer strike; and they were vaguely disapproving of it anyway.
“At least the Academie’s artificers have an exemption, Symon tells us,” said their mother. “Good. Can you imagine the inconvenience if your exams were delayed by it? Your graduation?”
“Mm,” said Moyna. “Imagine.”
“There’s no need to take that tone, Moyna.”
“Nothing will delay my precious future,” said Moyna. “Sorry, your precious future. I could go to the temple and beg it of Mathé’s spark and all the spirits, and still nothing would.”
“Moyna.”
“We’re not doing this again,” said her father. “Berta—we agreed. Not today.”
“When you think of all we gave up—”
“I never asked you to!”
“Bread, Ellyn?” said their father loudly, offering the basket.
Ellyn took it with a long-suffering look at Moyna, and the argument stopped anyway for the water salutations, all of them lifting their cups in memory of the wide Melnyne, homeriver of the city of Greteford.
Each cup of water was part of the greater whole, as every fire was part of the great flame.
“And we pay respect to the main river of this land, named Sieuxerr,” her mother finished.
Sieuxerr, the squeezed gentleman. Moyna could relate.
Her parents had done what was necessary for their community.
A pair of young married mages, they’d left their home and come to an unfamiliar city, learned a new language, had three children and produced two precious healers.
They’d sacrificed. They’d uprooted, left behind their homeriver, and had to start a relationship with a new, non-Camarran river, in their adulthood.
Their reward would be to return home triumphant, bringing the healers they’d been sent out to produce, and live out their days in familiar, beloved streets.
And Moyna would be valued, and paid well, and never lack for respect or security, and not exist at the whim of the Committee for Healer Workforce.
For her not to appreciate that was selfishness.
They’d raised her better than that. And they’d never led her on to any expectation that her future held anything else, had they?
They’d had this argument too many times to count.
At a certain point Moyna had stopped bothering.
Today, however, the future was on the other side of an all-too-close door, already ajar, and the fight rose in Moyna on a tide of panic.
Her father could afford to be calm. He knew he’d already won.
His future was close, his homecoming, and he was reaching for it with both hands.
She couldn’t begrudge him that. Only the fact that it hinged on his bringing Moyna, his triumphant creation, home with him.
Moyna had never bothered to explain to her parents that she didn’t like the profession of healing itself; that she found constantly being face-to-face with people and their needs to be exhausting.
Anatomy was interesting. The magic itself could be satisfying. She did enjoy solving problems.
But healing was people: their emotions and suffering and expectations, an endless buffeting tempest of them.
Maybe if Moyna had chosen this, she’d have figured out if she could shift the structure of herself to handle it—and if not, put the idea peaceably down.
But she’d arrived at the Academie already dreading it, already ground down by the expectations of her family, of the city that sent them, and by her utter lack of freedom to choose.
Moyna had an ache in her temporomandibular joints by the end of lunch. All the stale unsaid things were throbbing there.
And she found herself freshly determined that, given the inevitability of her leaving, she would find as many answers as she could first. Their odd exam questions. Ysabel’s murder. All of it. She would do her part and force it all to come clear.
Then she could leave Sieuxerr and pretend as hard as she could that it didn’t exist. That her past had been razed to the ground behind her and she had only an unwanted future which she would, somehow, have to shape into something she could stand.
At least she would taste fresh mayweed, and know her ancestors’ waters, and maybe she’d be able to drape the idea of home over herself like an inherited coat. Maybe one day it would fit.
Moyna left the house feeling twice as sharp and disgruntled as before—nearly as badly as she’d felt the first morning of the exam, thinking about failing and falling.
Running rooftops wasn’t going to cut it if she wanted to be anything but useless and crabby for the rest of the day.
A fuck might not work either, this time, but it’d at least be fun to find out.