Twenty-Two
The keen reader will note a number of references to the published arrays of Healer M.
E. Caignel. Let me reassure you that what may seem like a needlessly thorough debunking in no way represents a lack of respect for my brother in Mathé’s art.
We owe it to one another to cast a critical eye over the past, to smooth the way for the profession as a whole to advance.
My esteemed colleague is of course welcome to publish an equally rigorous commentary on the errors in my own works, if he can find any.
—From the introduction to a monograph by Healer R. J. Defaloise in Proceedings of the New Interventionist Council, volume XXI
One day Jehan would manage to have a normal-sized fucking feeling about Estiene Marcelle, but it seemed that day was still far off.
It was unfair. It had been unfair since their first-year orientation party, when Jehan finally let the name Marcelle sink through his haze of excitement and alcohol, and decided that it wasn’t enough to stop him from fucking the person who was looking at him with such transparent, flattering lust. He could commence resenting the Head Healer’s son for being a privileged little snot after he’d discovered what that lovely mouth tasted like, and what those waist-length braids felt like coming apart under his fingers.
(Perfect, and perfect, were the answers there.)
It had remained unfair for five full years.
Just how unfair it was had been brought home to him in spectacular, ugly fashion a month ago, when Estiene had knocked on Jehan’s room door and, instead of shoving Jehan down onto the bed for a welcome study break, stood stiffly while he told Jehan that it was time Estiene began thinking seriously about his future, not the pleasant diversions of the present, and it would be best if he—if they—didn’t do this anymore.
It was like Head Healer Marcelle had employed a wind-mage to send speech out through his son’s mouth, and all the worse because Estiene clearly believed every word.
Right, Jehan had said, pride wrapping like iron around his spine. Of course. Water under the Duke’s Bridge. Have a good future and all that.
Jehan had grimly finished his spring-term studies, nursing a broken heart and an enormous bubble of class-conscious outrage, and doodling in the margins of his notes all the ways in which he wanted Estiene Marcelle to suffer as he was suffering.
Bites from venomous beasts had featured heavily.
And they hadn’t exchanged another word until Estiene berated Jehan for turning up late to their first Grand Exam case.
He’d been well on his way to forming thick scabs over the hurt until this week, when Estiene had twice kissed him and kicked all the lids off again.
And now Estiene had been arrested?
If this was the spirits’ idea of granting his spiteful wish, they’d picked an interesting way of going about it.
Jehan and Moyna ended up in a small crowd of fifth-years—and several scholars with trims other than purple who had succumbed to healer curiosity and been swept along with it—trying to defy the limits of human ears and find out what was happening on the other side of a guarded door leading into one of the North Wing’s meeting rooms. Apparently all the drama had started up in the knocking room, where the Chancellor—the Chancellor!
—had discovered Estiene practically in the act of stabbing someone to death.
“Wait,” said Moyna, grabbing at Luc Pasquier’s sleeve as he turned to deliver this narration to someone else. “Someone else was killed? He’s not being arrested for . . . Ysabel?”
“What?” said Luc, eyes going wide. “Caudotte? I’d heard she burned out. You’re saying that was murder, too? Wow. Two murders. Can you imagine the Head Healer’s face when he finds out? Can you imagine how much his son will fetch on the open market for healers, if the city holds his life-bond?”
Jehan could.
“Who else was killed?” he asked. He hadn’t seen Alys or Clement in this crowd. A new seed of fear sprouted. “Was it another scholar?”
But the victim’s identity, it seemed, had not yet snuck out to the rumour mill. Only that Estiene had been caught standing over them with a knife. No! A scalpel. No—a sword!
“Seriously?” said Jehan.
“Well, maybe,” said Lysande Coran, who’d volunteered that last one with a pleased look on her face.
“Where’s an Orolundic spy-mage when you need one,” said Luc, eyeing the closed door with longing. “Do you think they’ll cuff his hands and march him out?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” said Moyna repressively—in response to which part was unclear.
It was near unthinkable that even gendarme townies would restrain a healer, and spy-mages were something out of lurid historical fiction.
Orolund hadn’t grown sensecasters for centuries.
It was all wood-mages up there now, making a killing in the shipyards.
“And don’t you be a killjoy, Apprice. This is a dramatic situation if ever there were one,” said Lysande.
Jehan, tall enough to see over several other heads, realised that the maroon uniform tunic of the gendarmes was topped by a face he’d seen before.
He seized Moyna by the wrist, remembered all at once that he was furious with her for trying to sabotage their exam, then shelved that fury to be dealt with later.
They needed to know who was dead. He dragged her through the group and right up to the doors.
“No, you can’t go in, and no, I won’t tell you anything,” Gendarme Quentin recited, but frowned at them in recognition.
“Yes, it’s us,” said Jehan. “We’re part of Scholar Marcelle’s exam group. We were there when—” He made the geas gesture. “We might be able to provide important information about what Marcelle was doing,” he added impressively.
Quentin sucked at his cheek and let them through, to the annoyance and excitement of everyone behind them. Jehan thought of dancing to the head of the theatre viewing queue with Estiene, only two days ago. Estiene had always been able to act with a confidence like sliding a knife through butter.
And indeed, despite the situation, the Estiene currently sitting in the meeting room with Gendarme Balay by his shoulder had a familiar look, only slightly tinged by fear: that of someone for whom the world usually arranged itself in his favour.
Also in the room were Chancellor Morant; Secretary Lefer; Master Doulze, the hawk-nosed manager of the Academie’s non-healer staff, who had a dazed, drawn look like someone awakening from a painful healing array; and that gendarmerie captain who’d attended Ysabel’s death and hadn’t introduced himself.
The captain pinned Jehan and Moyna with a look as soon as they entered. He got there even before Estiene, who let his gaze glance off Jehan’s for a hot-stove moment before looking resolutely at the wall.
Jehan did not like the look on the officer’s face.
It was too close to the look Guion Blavot got when something was on the verge of falling out even better than he’d wished.
Jehan had been cradling his intense personal worry about Blavot like a hot coal, even more blistering given that they’d just failed a Grand Exam case and his planned escape to Mostau would fall through if they failed another and he had to repeat the year.
Seeing that look on the face of someone who’d just arrested Estiene was not a comfort. It also reminded Jehan that he had excellent reasons to avoid the gendarmes and their questions. And yet he’d stormed in here without a second thought.
“Scholar Apprice, Scholar Fortier,” said the Chancellor, frowning. “What are you doing here?”
Well, they were in it now. Jehan swept in with the same explanation he’d given outside, delivered with his most charming smile and a dollop of deference.
“All right,” the captain said, pleasantly enough. “In your helpful opinion, what was Scholar Marcelle doing locked in a room with the murdered body of an Academie artificer?”
Not a scholar. Weak with relief, Jehan opened his mouth, and only then realised that the only real answer—Investigating the death you couldn’t be bothered to, I assume—was the verbal equivalent of kicking a wasps’ nest.
He closed his mouth again to think of a better one. Estiene rolled his eyes at the wall. Moyna said, sharp—“An artificer? Which one?”
“Floris Decroy,” said Doulze. He had a light voice for such a severe-looking man. “One of our longest-serving— I simply can’t understand why— Oh, his poor wife and son, and in the week of Mathé’s Feast, as well . . .”
At least being part of the questioning seemed to have legitimised their presence in the room.
“Decroy,” said Moyna. She gave Jehan a quick glance and Estiene a longer one, when he looked over with a glimmer of interest and hope.
“He was the artificer that Clement and I went to ask about Ysabel, yesterday. He said he was the last out of the Rondelle the night before the Grand Exam started, but that he hadn’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. ”
“And yet he’s supposed to have remembered something significant that he felt he had to pass on exclusively to you, is that right?”
It was directed at Estiene.
“I don’t know,” said Estiene, sounding frayed. “I told you. I’ve never spoken with the man. All I know is what’s on the note.”
The door to the meeting room opened again. This time it admitted Jourdain Marcelle, who was wearing his most urbane smile with a tension that suggested some fraying of his own was going on beneath the surface.
“Colet,” was his greeting to the Chancellor, instantly claiming familiarity. And then, “Gendarme Captain Thoury,” with an elaborate nod to the white-haired officer.
“Healer Marcelle.” Thoury matched his courtesy. “How kind of you to respond to our summons, even though I’m sure your many patients at the Hospital will begrudge sparing you for such a minor matter.”
Jehan knew that Marcelle barely laid hands on patients himself, these days. Thoury clearly knew it as well. Marcelle ignored the jibe and directed his attention to Estiene, who shrank an inch into himself.