Twenty-One
With all the usual caveats around not wasting the gifts of the spirits to the world, as well as the more prosaic ones about the economic value of every trained healer: I propose, again, that we discuss some kind of exclusion process for mages who manifest the healing gift, but are not and should not be destined for the work.
If not for personal preference—that, I agree, would be an impossible precedent—then at least for those potential scholars whose characters render them unfit to wield this level of power over others.
—Internal memo to senior faculty committee from a previous Dean of Scholars
Estiene found Lysande Coran in the complex intervention recovery ward of the Hospital, poring over discharge files in the staff room.
It was a useful way to study real cases, getting their whole story from presentation to discharge.
The records department had long since spilled over the original space allocated to it in the Hospital, and was now housed in a separate building a few streets away.
Even in the best organised wards, at the quietest times of year, there was a delay of a few days before the files of recently discharged patients were removed.
And the complex intervention recovery ward was never quiet.
“Marcelle,” said Lysande, in suspicious greeting.
Most of their cohort was on a first-name basis outside of formal and professional settings. Lysande Coran behaved as if they were all on a Hospital ward at all times. Her life was a professional setting.
“Lysande,” said Estiene.
“There are plenty of other wards, you know.” She hunched around her file as if he were about to seize it from her.
Estiene wouldn’t have minded settling in beside her to study.
Not recognising hare fever in their first Grand Exam case was still bothering him.
And a fluttering, tooth-grinding panic rose in him at the idea of failing another case—failing the Grand Exam.
No matter what deal the Chancellor had made with his father and forced on Brodier, surely their second examiner wouldn’t agree to go along with it.
An almost-pass might be massaged across the line. But not a disaster like today’s case.
“I was looking for you,” he said. “I wanted to ask you about Ysabel.”
Her suspicion thickened. “What, whether you’re the only one in with a chance for Dux Scolaris now she’s taken herself out of the picture? You might have pipped me in the writtens by a point, but—”
“No,” said Estiene. “More—if you know anything about her research project, or what she might have been doing in the Rondelle the night before the Grand Exam?”
Lysande blinked. She was a broad, soft young woman with lazy, liquid eyes and an incongruous air of absolute keen alertness, like an animal bred for luxury who had accidentally found itself in a hunting kennel and thrived there.
“Why would I?” she demanded. “And why bother wondering? She’s dead, it’s all very sad, I’m sure, but it’s not as if you can do anything about it.
Eyes on your own paper, Marcelle. Unless—are you hoping to pick up her project yourself and get a publication out of it, with the work mostly done for you? ”
She’d sharpened, sensing a potential chase that she might win. Estiene was tired just looking at her. All his vague thoughts of subterfuge fled.
“I’m trying to work out if someone killed her,” he said. “Did you?”
Lysande gave a bubble of a laugh. She seemed genuinely surprised.
“Mathé’s blood, what a concept,” she said.
“You’re serious? I didn’t work my arse off for five years just to end up cheating my way to the top.
Caudotte could have done with a few good slaps in the face, but I wasn’t going to risk my fingers doing it.
So she couldn’t take the pressure. Not all of us can.
And before you run to the Deans accusing me of ridiculous crimes, in the hope of gutting my chances,” she added, “I was in the library the night before the Grand Exam, studying. I didn’t leave until just before breakfast. Ask Pasquier. ”
“You didn’t . . . sleep?”
A scornful look. “Sleep is for summ—”
Sharp magical tones filled the air, and Lysande’s hunting nose swung at once to the ward door. Someone had hit the artificer’s alarm by a bedside.
Every scholar had that noise woven into their nerves by the end of first year. Estiene could have been mostly unconscious from a head wound and still he’d have tried to stand up and run at the sound of it.
Someone should do that as a research project, he thought absurdly, as he and Lysande dodged a medic’s trolley and dashed toward the golden-red lights swirling above a bed.
Estiene was glad to see another healer present already: a middle-aged woman with the silver belt tabs of an experienced ward generalist. This healer had her hands on the patient, her eyes closed and brow furrowed.
A nurse quickly summarised the patient’s story.
He’d been carried into the clinic late at night after walking drunk into the path of a horse-drawn carriage, and had multiple severe injuries treated in an emergency array.
Recovery on the ward uneventful. Due to be discharged this evening.
But he’d suddenly gone pale and collapsed, and couldn’t be woken. Pulse was faint and fast.
“Here,” said Estiene as soon as the nurse paused. The healer opened her eyes long enough to see the grey of their robes, grimace slightly—Estiene wanted to bristle and point out the purple—and close them again. You took what help you had.
“Haven’t gotten further than pump,” she said. “My sweep was fast and dirty. Take a second look, Scholar Marcelle.” Estiene ignored Lysande’s huff and stepped up.
Pump was keeping the vital heart going when it was doing its best to stop.
Sweep was diagnostics. Estiene’s own heart was going hard, his palms sweaty, his skin tingling with life and something oddly like gladness.
This was real healing. No false scenario with murky motivations and invisible assessors.
No corrupt Academie. No death, he promised himself fiercely, and put his own fingers to the man’s wrist.
Recent healing magic was all through the man’s body; Estiene could feel where repairs had been made to long bones, to a lacerated spleen, to the ribs. He could feel the other healer’s magic active around the heart, a bright web squeezing and releasing.
Now he had to ignore that and find the damage. What was going wrong? He was moving too quickly. He forced himself to slow down. His magic slid slow and questing from the head down.
There. The taste of hot stones with water trickling over them. Fluid passing from one space to another in rhythmic spurts.
“Mesenteric arterial bleed,” Estiene said. “I can stop it, but he’s losing a lot of blood into the abdomen.”
He opened his eyes. A green-robed medic and another healer had joined them.
Estiene recognised Healer Fanuche, who had the orange trim of a trauma specialist and a well-known dislike of Estiene’s father.
They exchanged a nod with the ward generalist and looked hard at Estiene, then said, “Go ahead, Scholar. I’ll support you. ”
“I can—” said Lysande.
“Thank you, yes. You can stand support as well,” said Fanuche.
It was almost certainly not what Lysande had meant, but you didn’t argue with seniority.
“Fluids,” ordered the generalist, and the medic left at a run.
Fanuche put their hand on Estiene’s shoulder.
This time when his magic set forth it had the sturdiness of a second healer’s power behind it, and then a third, as Lysande joined in.
As a scholar, he’d not often found himself at the pointy end of any healing requiring an array.
Now he was being trusted to do what he’d been training for five years to do.
Healing an arterial bleed had been explained to Estiene by a tutor as half needlework and half basic plumbing, and the image was useful.
He held firm the image of the artery as an unbroken tube—it was difficult; it was small and elusive and surrounded by a growing amount of muddying fluid that dampened the precision of what Estiene could feel—and sent his magic in as small a stream as he could manage without losing hold of it altogether.
“Not much left to pump,” the generalist said. “Faster, Scholar.”
Faster.
It was like threading a needle with one eye closed, but once the magic was working, it happened fast. Estiene let his power linger long enough to make sure that there was no further trickle of blood, then moved on to persuading the blood in the patient’s abdomen to break itself down into absorbable parts, while the generalist switched from grim pumping to carefully coaxing the heart to take over on its own.
When they were done the patient was still paper-pale and unconscious, but he was no longer dying. Estiene had sweat on his forehead and was ravenous.
“We must have missed it when he came in, and the bleed suddenly enlarged,” said Healer Fanuche. “Well, that’s why we have recovery wards. Good work, Scholars. Write it up.”
Estiene was tingling with satisfaction as he dutifully recorded the healing in the patient’s notes, and continued to tingle all the way back to the Academie campus and the fifth-year residential hall.
The next time something like that happened, Estiene would be Healer, not Scholar. And perhaps he would arrive at the bedside first, and run the array himself, and haul someone else back from unnecessary pain or death.
For lunch he downed a huge bowl of creamy fish stew and a potato cake the size of his hand, and took the opportunity to confirm with Danton Pasquier—the most notorious night-bird of their cohort, whom everyone suspected of using very ill-advised magic to keep himself awake—that yes, Lysande had been in the library from dinner until the small hours of the morning.
Another dead end.