Twenty-Four
I really believe that if it wasn’t the serrage it would have been something else.
Healing has never been able to answer every ailment, solve every problem, even for those who could access it easily.
And for those of us who dedicated our lives to healing people, and have now been left unwillingly unfit for work we were well prepared to keep on doing—we have been called every name under the sun, for the sole crime of succumbing to the same thing as all those patients that it hurt us deeply not to be able to help.
—Letter to the Editor, published in the Sieuxerr Gazette
Things were already about as bad as Estiene could imagine them being, and then the reporter showed up.
He and his father were almost home, having walked in leaden silence from the Academie, and she was sitting on the low wall bracketing their front gate, openly waiting for them: a middle-aged woman with mild features and bronzed skin, a no-nonsense four braids, and well-made clothes.
She looked completely at home in this wealthy quarter just south of the Hospital, although Estiene’s grandmother would no doubt have something disapproving to say about the amount of blue embroidery on her lightweight silk journade.
“Healer Marcelle,” she greeted Estiene’s father. It sounded respectful, but Estiene could hardly miss the way his father went even more rigid beside him. “Mathé’s grace to you in their feast week. I hear you’ve been accused of murder.”
“You hear incorrectly.”
“Ah, so it was your son, then?” She turned a friendly, motherly smile onto Estiene. “Our readers will be equally shocked and appalled either way, of course. Would you like to make sure your side of the story gets heard?”
Estiene thought about the boxing ring, and Jehan with tape on his hands, and the fact that tonight the fifth-years would have their final self-defence class.
He’d been looking forward to it. And he was very much in a mood to punch things.
He was about to say something rude when his father’s hand landed on his shoulder and squeezed hard.
“Don’t you have real things to be writing about, Madalena, instead of harassing healers in the street?”
“You know me, Healer Marcelle,” said Madalena.
Some steel snuck out from behind her mild expression.
She wasn’t holding a notebook or a pen. Her right hand was clenched tightly, and when she stood up from the wall to face them Estiene noticed the uneven way she shifted her weight.
Serrage: not a severe case, but unmistakable.
“I’ve been writing about healer politics and the Hospital for most of my professional life.
And you’re not just any healer, are you?
You’ve gone to great lengths to be visibly at the top of the heap, Jourdain.
You can’t complain when you’re looked at, now. ”
Estiene could. In fact Estiene wanted badly to be inside the house, which was just there—to be behind a closed door, hidden from anyone’s eyes and ears. He wanted to step behind his papa’s legs like he was a child of five. It made him furious.
“Neither of us has anything to say to you,” said his father. “And if you print anything that suggests we’ve spoken, I will be writing to your editor and Lord Baizelat to ask that you be removed from the Gazette.”
It was the tone the Head Healer used on scholars and junior healers who’d made a silly mistake during rounds.
Estiene had been on the receiving end of it several times in his life, and had been kept awake with a pounding heart, remembering it, every time.
The reporter Madalena blinked twice but was otherwise uncowed.
“And I’d point out,” she said, “that you don’t have as much currency as you think to spend with either my editor or our boss, if you’re a suspected killer. People have to trust their healers completely. Wouldn’t you agree, Scholar Marcelle?”
She looked invitingly at Estiene. His father’s hand tightened in unnecessary warning. He found himself fiddling with the ends of his hair.
Madalena noticed and her mouth quirked. “A fascinating style for a scholar,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me—”
But Estiene had started moving as soon as he felt himself blush, and he all but ran inside the house. If only he could recapture the sense of daring he’d had the previous night, creeping through dark streets and lying his way into a warehouse. There was nothing exciting about this fear.
His father was thin-lipped when he entered.
Estiene would have rather liked to keep running, but there was nowhere else to run to.
He followed his father upstairs, to the grand study, his feet following automatically in anticipation of a lecture.
The house was quiet apart from some distant noise from the kitchens.
Marion would be on her way home from school, and Estiene had no idea of his stepmother Oudine’s schedule, let alone his grandmother’s.
“As if that haircut weren’t ill-advised and provocative enough a week ago, Estiene. Now it will be mentioned in the Gazette as evidence of criminal tendencies, no doubt.”
Jourdain and Estiene’s grandmother had both coldly, pointedly stared at Estiene and then coldly, pointedly failed to comment, when Estiene first cut his hair. Clearly Jourdain had been keeping it in his pocket for future use.
Estiene grasped the memory of Jehan saying whorish as if it were a prayer.
He said, “Everything that’s just happened and you want to fight about my hair?”
His father sat behind his desk, where a bluestone inkwell dominated the expanse of wood. “I have no intention of fighting with you.”
No. That wasn’t how things worked. Estiene swallowed a sigh and, to save time, pulled over the embroidered stool.
The cushioned seat was more pilled and ragged than he remembered.
He wondered if Marion also spent time sitting on this stool thinking about her faults, or if Jourdain left the disciplining of his daughter to Oudine.
An odd pause descended. Jourdain let out the sigh that Estiene hadn’t, but he didn’t say anything for a while. Then— “The lack of consideration, Estiene. You clearly don’t care at all how difficult you’ve made things for me.”
“For—” Estiene swallowed that too. He stared at his father. “You haven’t even asked me any more about what happened today. Don’t you want to know?”
It was a perverse question, spat out from sheer incomprehension, because Estiene had already intended to skirt the truth when asked what he was doing in the knocking room; to say he’d received the note, and leave it at that.
“Not particularly,” said Jourdain. He raised a forbidding hand, when Estiene made as if to speak again.
To his horror, Estiene realised the next question was: Do you think I actually killed him?
Deep inside him came another: Would I put it entirely past you to have Ysabel killed in the first place?
Estiene sat on the old stool with his knees bent up too far, splintered by the realisation that his trust in his father stopped at such a point. His face was hot. He wanted to bury it in Jehan’s neck and ask to have his mind wiped clean. He could never do that again. Splinters and more splinters.
He said, “What are you going to tell Marion?”
“I can’t believe that you would get yourself mixed up in something like this, in the week of your Grand Exam,” his father said, ignoring him. “You’re so close to graduating, this is so important—”
“So important that you had to make a deal with the Chancellor to cheat my way into a high grade.”
“—and you’re not the son of townies or anthem larks, for whom simply graduating as a healer would be enough to celebrate, you come from an unbroken line of Sieuxerran healers, and we—”
Estiene, heart pounding at his own daring, wondered if his father had decided to ignore everything out of his mouth.
But his words must have filtered through, because Jourdain stopped abruptly with a look on his face that Estiene hadn’t seen before.
For a moment it was almost like guilt. Not very like, and it was quickly smothered by defiance and contempt, but close enough.
“That’s why I cut my hair, by the way,” Estiene added.
He wanted it to be defiant. It came out childish and small. And it had been a stupid thing to say, because his father leapt upon it instead of actually acknowledging what Estiene had said about the Chancellor.
“A juvenile and absurd response,” Jourdain said. “Beneath you, and beneath me. Here I am defending you in front of the city’s most antagonistic gendarme as a mature scholar, on the brink of your career, and you’ve been throwing silly tantrums like a child left alone with the scissors.”
“I—”
“How can I expect you to navigate the vital first steps of your career on your own, when you have so little impulse control?”
Triumphant, Jourdain leaned back in his chair.
Now that he’d begun, Estiene wondered how to continue. How to have an argument with his father. It seemed like it’d take muscles he’d never used before and courage he didn’t have. If he wanted to throw punches, he had somewhere he could do that.
He stood.
“I’m going back to the Academie,” he said. “You’re right, Papa. It’s the Grand Exam. We still have two more cases to get through.” And we failed today’s. It’d be pointless ammunition, but the geas wouldn’t let him explain it directly, and his father hadn’t asked.
“You will not talk to any reporters about this,” was his father’s farewell. “Or anyone else. Keep your head down and pass your exam and we’ll deal with Augustin Thoury and the gendarmerie . . . later.”
As he was leaving the house, Estiene ran into his grandmother just inside the front door.
“Estiene,” she said. Not even Estiene’s mixture of anger, terror, and disappointment could stop him from slowing down to kiss her cheeks politely.
“You’re leaving? Be careful, there’s a horrible woman loitering on the street asking rude, intrusive questions.
Can you believe she had the gall to say—”
“Goodbye, Mamie,” said Estiene hastily, and once again fled.
His father could weather that storm. No doubt Estiene would regret it in a few days, when this all fell apart and he was dragged away in cuffs, and then found to be a murderer because it was convenient for Thoury and convenient for the Committee for Healer Workforce and convenient for whomever did kill the artificer and Ysabel.
Surely Madalena was right—not even his father’s name would be enough to save him, and in fact could look suspicious if it were brought to bear on his behalf.
Spots swam in front of Estiene’s eyes. He stopped and leaned against one of the parfunda trees that lined the street and dropped purple blossoms to lie beautifully against the blue of the road.
That, said an inner voice that sounded like Alys, was a good why. Why send the note to Estiene, when it had been Clement and Moyna who had gone to speak to Decroy and the other artificers about their group’s investigation into Ysabel’s death?
Because if any of the others had been framed, then Estiene and Alys could have rallied their families’ resources to push through and get them out of trouble.
Estiene’s father had been effectively defanged.
Perhaps Estiene could still throw himself on the mercy of Alys and her ducal connections, much as he hated the idea, but Captain Thoury’s dislike of healers and the Head Healer made it a tricky game in every direction.
Estiene continued down the street. His head had stopped spinning but his thoughts had not.
Fuck, he wanted to talk to Jehan. Even if Jehan would only laugh at him for hurling anxious accusations when Jehan had been the one at risk of being arrested as a criminal healer.
Jehan’s laugh had a way of mellowing the worst of the world.
He could be in the same room as Jehan tonight, at least. And .
. . the same room as everyone else in his cohort.
A new humiliation washed over him; word must have spread across the entire Academie by now.
There would be plenty of scholars, fifth-year and otherwise, who’d be delighted to see a Marcelle taken down a peg in such a dramatic and gossip-worthy way.
Estiene touched his hair again. Then let his hand drop and his footsteps stay firm.
He’d helped save a life today, and he had not taken one away, even if his hand had gripped the knife and the world thought otherwise.
Perhaps if he pretended with all his might that his own knowledge of these facts was enough, then Mathé and the spirits would make it so.