Twenty-Two #3
The crowd of scholars outside the meeting room had shrunk, but there was still a handful of people there to see that Estiene was not being marched out under arrest. Jehan assumed the entire fifth-year cohort had heard the scandalous news by now, but neither Clement nor Alys was anywhere to be seen.
“We need to talk to the others,” said Moyna, clearly thinking the same.
Checking the residence hall and knocking on their doors failed to turn up Clement or Alys, as did a futile trip to the study carrel section of the library.
“Hold on,” said Moyna then, “did Clement say they were going to the Hospital today? To talk to Thumery?”
“No, that was me. And Thumery wasn’t on the ward, anyway, he— Oh!
Look at that, Mathé’s luck has found us at last.” He pointed across the stretch of grass in front of the library to where the sun was shining off Alys’s golden head as she walked in stride with Clement, clearly on their way back into the Academie campus from the main town entrance.
Normally he’d have made a gossipy comment to Moyna about how cosy the two of them looked, but she didn’t deserve gossip today.
Jehan left Moyna’s side and ran down with a shout of, “Hey! Clement!”
He hadn’t quite thought through the fact that he was going to be breaking the news to them about Estiene’s arrest, nor for the immediate onslaught of questions for which he didn’t really have answers.
By the time Moyna joined them, he was all too happy to suggest they find somewhere—“Not the knocking room”—to have a four-person version of their plotting sessions.
They ended up under the same tree as that morning.
Jehan told them that Thumery had been sent home for a morning to sleep after taking an extra night shift, so he hadn’t been able to corner their chorale conductor yet.
Clement and Alys had asked Konrad Omeyer about Alys’s symptoms, as they’d intended, and found out that Ysabel had been involved—oh, huge surprise—in the healing that caused Konrad’s own burnout.
And then it was back to the most pressing question at hand.
“So,” said Moyna, “if Estiene is telling the truth—”
“If?” said Jehan.
“I have less than perfect trust when it comes to what people would or wouldn’t do for their family. And you know that if you asked any scholar in our year, they’d tell you that Estiene would do anything for his father’s approval.”
That was true. Jehan vaguely remembered making a joke about it himself, back when this all began. But all he could think of was Estiene standing in the healer’s room in Blavot’s warehouse, saying, I know you’d never kill anyone.
“You don’t mean it,” he said. “I know you don’t like him, but—”
“Fuck you I don’t mean it,” said Moyna. “You’re the one who’s cock-struck.”
Anger whirled up in Jehan. He wanted to be in the fighting ring, where he could strike out at Moyna and she could strike back.
He struck anyway.
“And you’re the one who didn’t speak up with the diagnosis in our first case, hoping we’d fail, so I don’t see why we should trust your judgement at all.”
“What?” said Alys and Clement, nearly in unison.
“Jehan,” said Moyna.
“Go on,” said Jehan. “Tell them.”
Moyna took a shaky breath. Her face set into a tense mask. And she told them.
Alys was depressingly kind about it. Clement looked like they’d been slapped, but they listened without interruption to Moyna’s blunt apology: explaining why she’d done it and pointing out that she’d thought better of it by the second case.
She was committed now. She would do her utmost to help them all pass.
Jehan, to his annoyance, found his anger ebbing as well. He knew what it was to feel trapped and desperate. He opened his mouth to give a grudging comment to that effect, caught the absolute venom of Moyna’s glance—seething at him for telling the others in the first place—and closed it again.
This week was just delight after fucking delight, wasn’t it?
“All right,” Clement said. “It’s in the past. Let’s get back to what’s important.”
“I . . . also don’t believe that Estiene would kill anyone,” volunteered Alys. She still had that bloodshot eye, but looked markedly more healthy than she had that morning. “Though his father is very ambitious for him.”
“Marcelle is ambitious when it comes to his own reputation,” said Jehan. “He doesn’t give a shit about Estiene except as an extension of himself, and if Estiene wasn’t so bone-headed, he’d realise it.”
Clement said, “Let’s assume it all played out exactly as Estiene said. It seems like the main question is—was the artificer killed to keep a secret, or was he killed to frame Estiene?”
“Why not both?” said Alys.
“All right,” said Jehan. “So someone killed Ysabel, and Artificer Decroy saw or heard something about it when he was there before the geas kicked in at midnight. Why wouldn’t he have said so when you went and asked him about it yesterday?”
“He didn’t seem particularly fond of healers in general,” said Moyna.
“He and the gendarmes have that in common,” said Jehan. “Why wouldn’t he go to them?”
“He might have threatened to,” said Alys. “That’s the blackmailing approach. I know something important—I’ve kept it secret for now, but I’ll go to the authorities and tell all, unless you pay up.”
“He did complain about his salary,” said Clement.
“And,” said Moyna, twisting her fingers suddenly, “I was . . . rather dramatic about the consequences if a healer was found guilty of killing another healer. He’d have had reason to think they’d pay almost anything to keep it secret.”
“It’s not looking great for Head Healer Marcelle,” said Jehan uneasily. “Why try to blackmail Estiene at all, unless it was his father?”
“But if it was, why not blackmail the Head Healer directly? Why go to the trouble of leaving a note in Estiene’s pigeonhole, with a set meeting time?
What if he hadn’t looked at it in time? Even if someone’s trying to frame both the Marcelles, it seems risky,” said Moyna.
“That Captain Thoury was so pleased with the situation I’d almost be ready to suspect him, but if all he wanted to do was frame a Marcelle for killing an artificer, he could do that easily.
There’d be no reason to also run the enormous risk of killing a healer like Ysabel. ”
“Unless someone else killed Ysabel and he saw a chance to . . . oh, Mathé’s blood, just what we need,” said Jehan. “A suspect who can’t be arrested because he does the arresting. I suppose you’ll say that corrupt gendarmes also make good murderers, Alys.”
A faint smile from Alys. “I think two separate murderers is too complicated even for me. And I agree with Moyna. Why kill Ysabel, especially in a way that suggested suicide, if it was all supposed to be about the Marcelles? And what about our exam, and those letters?”
Clement cleared their throat. “The other question is, why was Decroy killed now? I think . . . Konrad Omeyer let us see more than he wanted to, about how angry he was at Ysabel and how much he blamed her for what happened to him.”
It was a nasty, slippery thought, but Clement was right. They and Alys had questioned Konrad about something related to Ysabel, and discovered he had a personal reason to resent her. And within a few hours, someone had killed a possible witness and tried to throw the blame onto the Marcelles.
Alys made a resigned face. “We’ll have to consider him too. It does seem we’ve simply added another tangled ball of string to the others, doesn’t it? And we haven’t exactly excelled at solving one murder, so far. Now there are two.”
“And the gendarmes have gone from not being interested to having some suspects they really like, one of whom is Estiene,” said Jehan.
A sick feeling sat like heavy cream in his gut.
If they let this go, then there was an excellent chance the gendarmes wouldn’t care to ask any more questions once the geas lifted.
Jehan’s illegal activities would remain secret.
And Estiene would be the one whose labour would be sold for the rest of his life.