Twenty-Seven
—From the Contract of Enrolment in the Academie Sieuxerr
Moyna held the envelope addressed to herself.
Her head ached. She longed for something as simple as the gap between one rooftop and the next.
Of all the scholars on the verge of graduating, she must have the fewest illusions about the life they were chained to.
Healing was only simple in rare moments; mostly it was one complicated decision and draining fight after another.
She realised that she’d put the dregs of her hope into this search for Ysabel’s killer, wishing it might offer the black-and-white of truth and justice.
And here was Ysabel Caudotte herself, complicating things yet again from within the flame.
“That’s not like the others,” said Clement, rather uselessly.
“No,” said Moyna.
Clement eyed the envelope—much larger and thicker than the others had been, clearly containing far more than a simple letter—as if it were a charmed fire-starter about to erupt. It felt like that in Moyna’s hand.
“Even if this isn’t the whole of your missing piece,” Moyna said, “surely it’s part of it. Does it make sense to wait until late this afternoon to read it, when it could point us in a direction more useful than our current fucking around in the dark?”
“Jehan was right. It’d be cheating.”
“Oh, the whole idea of timed exams with no reference to texts or senior assistance is ridiculous anyway,” Moyna said. “That’s not how healing will work in the real world.”
The side of Clement’s mouth quirked. Moyna felt young and irritable.
“I don’t completely disagree,” they said, “but I think Jehan’s point was more that if we’re known to have cheated, then we’re all stuck with the penalty. Brodier could still decide to fail all of us, or apply to stick us with an extra year of bonded time.”
“Is it really likely to come out? If we don’t volunteer it?
” Moyna turned the envelope in her hands, as if she could put her magic into it and diagnose its contents.
“I can’t imagine the gendarmes will send away for a Kattem truth-taster, at hideous expense.
” Truth-tasters had the only rarer and better-paid mage specialty than healing, arising as they did in a scattered handful of places in the small, mountainous country of Katte.
“I don’t know,” said Clement. They, too, touched the envelope, and then caught their fingers back as if scalded. “But it doesn’t matter. We can’t make the decision for the others. It’s their exam too.”
Moyna couldn’t argue with that. And she already knew what Jehan felt about it.
Indeed, when she met him near the large bluestone building which contained the bodykeeping room, and told him about the large mystery envelope, he shook his head with a flat, firm mouth.
“No. We get through the exam, we pass the exam, and we do it in a way nobody can argue with.”
“We would definitely pass today’s case if we knew what it was.”
“If this is about you wanting us to fail so you don’t have to leave Sieuxerr, you can shove it right up your arse. Some of us do want to leave.”
Moyna’s hand twitched as she imagined scratching his eyes out.
She’d nearly refused to let him come with her today.
Nearly left him out of her plans. But there was a hard core of pragmatism in Moyna that told her not to let a stupid fight strip her of a partner in crime.
Sort of crime. Anti-crime, if you thought about it.
And so she’d grudgingly apologised for accusing Estiene of murder, Jehan had apologised for spilling her secret to the group, and they were back on a tentative footing of friendship. Or so she’d thought.
Jehan must have seen the renewed danger on her face, because he re-apologised at once. “I’m worried,” he added. “Saige wasn’t all that helpful— Well, I’ll tell everyone later. And you saw how keen Captain Thoury is to ruin Estiene’s life.”
Moyna was not going to let the conversation drag back to poor maligned little Estiene Marcelle. She nodded to the building and said, “You wanted to be a distraction. What are you going to do?”
“Depends on who we run into,” said Jehan, rather terrifyingly.
Going over the lunch hour had been a good call.
They ran into exactly one bodykeeper, a balding man who’d shaved his head instead of trying to maintain braids, and who wore a wide blue headband sewn with glass beads.
He answered their knock on the half-open staff area door with a full mouth and the most enormous sweetmouse Moyna had ever seen in his hand.
It smelled strongly of dried fruits, almond, and ginger.
Moyna could almost feel Jehan’s attention wavering.
But he didn’t disappoint her. When the bodykeeper asked what the scholars wanted, Jehan laid a dramatic hand on Moyna’s shoulder and announced—clearly fond of this idea and glad of an excuse to use it—that Moyna and the scholar who’d died had been secret lovers.
All she wanted was a chance to glimpse her beloved Ysabel’s body one more time before they graduated and left, and the body remained where it was for the use of the Academie.
He knew it was a bit irregular, but he’d convinced his dear friend that the bodykeepers would have sympathy for a tragic loss in this, Mathé’s own feast week.
Moyna did her best to adopt a sad expression. She wondered if Jehan had a backup plan if they were turned away.
The man wiped some crumbs from his mouth. He gazed at them thoughtfully for a moment and then stepped back to let them in.
“Oh, Mathé’s grace to you, Master,” said Jehan. Moyna nodded.
The bodykeeping room itself was kept cold, and the bodies colder still, by the work of water-mages; Moyna’s father had been called in to consult with the Academie artificers about it once. He’d described it as a dull job. He hadn’t described the room itself, which was anything but dull.
Jehan let out an impressed sound as the bodykeeper let them through a thick, slow-swinging wooden door, and into the room.
Room was far too small a word. It was as if someone had taken the basement stacks of the Academie’s library and combined them with the history-sodden wooden fittings of the Hospital’s largest healing theatre, then shoved the whole thing into the Grand Duchesse’s ballroom.
And then moved that ballroom to the highest snowfields of the Etirran mountains.
Goose bumps rose on Moyna’s skin at once, dressed as she was for the early summer outside.
Lining the room in rows were storage stacks like chests of drawers made for the bedrooms of giants.
This is remarkable, Moyna nearly said, but kept up her silent show of false grief.
Scholars usually had no reason to be here.
When a body was deemed due for use, it was thawed and taken to the anatomy labs which made up the other part of this building.
Moyna, inhaling air so cold it made her nose and throat hurt, had a vivid and none-too-pleasant memory of two feverish days in first year spent dissecting the corpse of a fellow healer, her fingers turning numb around the metal instruments.
Those sessions were always held in winter term to keep the bodies fresh for longer.
You could feel a patient’s anatomy with magic, but it wouldn’t make sense to you unless you had a mental map of what you were feeling.
Atlases and diagrams were a starting point; only dissection could flesh out the map. So to speak.
The bodykeeper had ducked back into the office to check his files—no doubt as thickly stacked as the bodies themselves—but still seemed to have trouble locating the right place.
After several minutes of ambling back and forth and peering at row numbers and changing his mind, he led them back to a tower of drawers not far from the entrance.
The cold didn’t seem to bother him. He pulled a small lever at arm height and the sound of thumping internal mechanics combined with the scent of magic.
Then he stepped in and, with a quick glance of warning at Moyna, pulled out the drawer second from the bottom.
“Ysabel Caudotte,” he said.
It was. White, so white, with her brown hair frosted and wiry. She was, at least, clothed. Grey robe, purple trim. Moyna had half expected otherwise.
“Thank you,” said Jehan. “Now, perhaps—”
“I’ll give you space,” the man said. “I’ll just be by the door we came through. But I’d feel better if I kept my eyes on one of my healers. You understand.”
“Of course,” said Moyna.
In fact it took her a second to understand that his healers were the rows of cold bodies.
She warmed to him for both the protectiveness and the wording.
From the start of their Academie years, scholars were encouraged to find distance from the dead: to embrace the fact that the vital animating spark that had been a person was no longer present, and so there was nothing left to be tainted or to care what happened to the flesh.
The Camarran tradition was also for burning after death, and scattering the ashes on a homewater, but there was more reverence paid to the body beforehand. Moyna had inherited this way of thinking from her parents. Every time she wanted to apologise, to gentle her hands, to give thanks.
“Ready?” Jehan said, once the bodykeeper had retreated.
Moyna stepped closer. Her heart rate had picked up.
Silly. Ysabel was blue-lipped and gone, with that dent in her skull and the skin mottled and congested over it.
Yet there was something of Ysabel left, if only in the way her mouth looked on the verge of spitting out an answer or an annoyed comment.
A body was so much to the living. That should, surely, be honoured.
Moyna reached gently and took hold of the cold, cold wrist. Perhaps this wouldn’t work after all. Perhaps she could only stand the recently dead. Perhaps any magic wrought on Ysabel would have since decayed into nothing; there were no textbooks to tell Moyna if this was likely or not.
Perhaps, perhaps. Healing only worked if you believed.