Twenty-One #2
Out of habit, Estiene checked the wooden grid of pigeonholes on his way from the dining hall to the main staircase.
There was something in the one labelled with his name.
He hoped his grandmother hadn’t decided to order his attendance at tomorrow’s Lantern Night festivities after all.
She usually respected the traditions of the Academie, but occasionally her sense of family loyalty edged ahead in the race.
The letter was folded but not sealed, and written in a hand remarkable only for the letters being painstakingly neat, with neither greeting nor signature.
I know people are interested in what TRULY happened to the girl who died in the Rondelle.
I also know something that’s relevant to this . . . and especially to YOU.
I’m sure you’d want to be the first to hear what I have to say.
Be at the knocking room at one o’clock and we can discuss it further.
Estiene dug in the pocket of his robe for his watch. Why had he lingered over lunch? How long had this been in his pigeonhole?
It was five past one. Estiene bit back a curse and ran.
After a little while he reasoned that anyone with an important message to pass on, who’d cared enough to pique his interest with a vague note, would probably consider it worth waiting if Estiene wasn’t there on the dot of the hour.
So he slowed to a brisk walk, and was glad of it on the flights of stairs up the North Tower all the way to the knocking room. He had little idea of what he was walking into, and didn’t want to walk into it red-faced and panting with exertion.
He even paused to straighten his robe and belt outside the door, which was closed but not locked.
The person waiting for Estiene inside the knocking room was seated on one of the chairs, turned away from the long table to gaze down at the quadrangle.
A crescent of dark hair was visible, and townie clothes: not a robe of either colour.
They didn’t turn at the sound of the door, nor did they offer a greeting.
Clearly they were making a point about Estiene being late.
Estiene was familiar with this trick. His father employed it all the time.
He was tempted to keep pointedly silent in return, and force the other into acknowledging him, but there was no point in antagonising them. Estiene did want to hear what they had to say.
“Apologies,” he said, lifting the note as he walked across the room. “I was out for lunch and only just got your message, and—”
Click.
Estiene turned back to the door, which he had closed behind him. That had been a key, turning in the lock. Locking him in. Unease flooded through Estiene.
“What . . .” He trailed off as the person in the chair remained unmoving and silent, their face turned to the window.
The unease tripled.
Bile and fear rose up Estiene’s throat together. Part of him wanted not to go any farther at all, as if by staying here with his feet bolted to the floor he would be able to pretend that this wasn’t happening.
But he had to know. So he crossed the last few feet and came around the side of the table.
The man in the chair had a single black braid, and a relaxed, clean-shaven face with round cheeks and the gold artificer piercing in his nose. Dark brown eyes stared out the window: a motionless gaze directed above the buildings, above the quadrangle, as if seeking peace in the summer sky.
The collar and shoulders of his chemise were soaked in patches which nearly matched the deep red of his linen chausses, and his throat was opened up like meat.
Estiene reached for another chair to steady himself. He was not touching another corpse this week.
Another corpse. A corpse who’d known something about Ysabel’s death and had been silenced before they could pass it on.
He owed Alys some apologies. This was worthy of the playhouses after all.
The part of Estiene which had wanted to freeze was now yelling that the door was locked, and trying very hard to panic, but Estiene had practice in shoving down panic in a crisis.
All healers did. It was how you found an arterial bleed and healed it when a patient was dying under your hands.
Time formed a mist around your own heartbeat and up through it rose clear, practical thoughts.
Thoughts like, You were just locked in by someone, and you might not have much time to act.
Thoughts like, Just as someone can die and then be dropped from a height, someone can be killed with magic and then have their throat cut.
For a few seconds Estiene stared at the most blood-soaked areas of collar and hair and leather-back of the chair, trying to work out if they suggested death in a different position and then someone being arranged in the chair. That seemed dramatic. How did one tell?
He gave up on that. He only had one skillset, really.
Estiene swallowed hard and cast another look at the locked door.
Perhaps he was supposed to be running over and hammering on it and demanding to be released.
Perhaps he was supposed to be raising the alarm.
Perhaps he wasn’t supposed to have heard the key at all.
Estiene didn’t often do what wasn’t expected of him. Not since he was a much smaller boy with little idea of how the world worked. But oh, he often wanted to.
That was enough for him to toss aside his earlier conviction about corpses. He gritted his teeth and took hold of one wrist—cool, but not cold—with a horrible flash to doing the same for Ysabel.
Fuck it. If Moyna Apprice could do it, then Estiene could at least try. He was going to be a diagnostician. He could send his magic in hard and fast, break through the wall of his own disgust, and endure the discomfort long enough to see if there was any remnant of another healer’s magic.
That determination lasted less than a second.
Hard and fast meant more magic going in and more magic rebounding with the silent, overwhelming no of it all.
Estiene jerked away and his knees gave out.
His magic was a storm of protest which thundered in his guts and sent their recent contents out through his mouth in a convulsive series of retches.
He managed at least not to vomit on the corpse.
Shaking and yearning for a cup of water, Estiene blinked hard and counted his senses. Leather chair-seat under his hand. Hard wood floor beneath his knees. The scent of his own sick, ugh. The usual knocking sound coming through the wall. And—what was that?
Light glinted on metal. Estiene wiped his mouth with his sleeve, winced, and bent down further to grab the thing from beneath the table.
This accomplished, he stood up and blinked some more. You found knives like this in every scholar’s kit, used for shaping pens and pencils and carving bored or desperate messages into their carrels. Some had wooden handles, some glasswork, many—like this—were plain serviceable bone.
Not many of them would have this much blood drying on the blade.
Again came the sound of a key in the lock. Estiene looked over just as the door opened and Secretary Lefer, a half step in front of Dean Saige and Chancellor Morant themself, stopped whatever she was saying in favour of staring at Estiene.
Who was, that small voice screamed, now standing above a throat-slit corpse with a knife in his own hand.
Estiene leaned over and vomited again.