Twenty-Eight
If you haven’t started weighing up the competition in your cohort, do it now. It’s never too early to be on top.
Sleep is for summer.
—Graffiti carved in bathroom stall in the second-year residence hall at the Academie Sieuxerr
Most Academie scholars found fourth year to be the worst. For Alys, it had been third year.
That was the year when her magic flared up out of nowhere, rising and falling like a young man’s voice, ruining her small, anxious healings.
Her marks in every practicum and exam were perilously bad.
She spent the third-year summer doing remediation in both intervention and diagnostics, frantically teaching herself her own version of control.
The only good thing about that year had been the residence hall, which was the oldest of all five halls and had a kind of skewed architectural charm which Alys found comforting. And the third-year hall’s cooks were the best. Everyone knew that.
She paused in the entrance foyer. The wood-panelled walls—the plaster death-mask of the Academie’s first Chancellor, sitting jauntily atop a plinth in the first landing of the main staircase—those long, uneven scratches along the wainscoting from where a scholar in decades past had infamously tried to adopt a stray dog.
None of them had changed since Alys’s own time in this hall.
The Academie was full of these crystallised spaces.
The names on the room directory changed each year, at least. Alys consulted it and found Genevieve Balenne, the grandniece of Lord Baizelat, and climbed the staircase to the top floor.
And there was something about the atmosphere that was different after all.
It was relief, Alys realised. The third-year exams had all taken place the previous week, and moving date wasn’t until after Mathé’s Feast, so they’d started their summer a week earlier than the other cohorts.
No doubt a lot of these closed doors hid scholars who were finally catching up on sleep.
“She’s not there,” someone said in passing, as Alys was knocking on Balenne’s door. They pointed down the corridor and said, “Common room.”
They were right. Balenne was sitting around a table in the top-floor common room along with—Alys was pleased to see—the other three people who’d been studying with her in the knocking room at the start of the week.
At the time, Alys hadn’t thought to question their industry.
Now she blinked at the piles of paper and books and said, hesitantly, “Are you remediating?”
“Tixerrant! Goodness. Hello.” Balenne put down her pencil and looked a bit pink. “What are you . . . ? No, we’re not. We’re getting a head start on planning curriculum grids for our study sessions next year.”
“None of us are going to flounder in fourth year,” said a round-faced boy with freckles. “If we got Yvonne through this year’s practicum exams, we can do anything.”
“Up your arse, Theo,” said one of the others, but she didn’t look up from what she was doing: braiding blue ribbons into the hair of the last member of the group, a genderfree scholar who was sketching something.
It looked suspiciously more like a design for a lantern than a healing array.
Not too hard at work, then. Alys didn’t have to feel bad about interrupting.
“I have a question for you, Balenne,” she said, pulling out a spare chair and sitting down.
“Genevieve,” said Balenne, going even pinker.
“Genevieve. I want to ask about Ysabel Caudotte.”
She had their attention at once. Braiding and sketching stopped.
“Is it true Estiene Marcelle killed her to stop her from taking one of the diagnostics jobs ahead of him?” asked Theo in a rush.
“Estiene did not kill anyone,” said Alys firmly. “Genevieve, you said that Ysabel gave you a tutorial in group array work earlier this year, and that it was an odd technique.”
“Winter term,” said Genevieve. “I remember because we got stuck in that one group study room where the heat-charm keeps decaying, so we were all wearing five layers under our robes.”
“What was odd about what she had you do?”
Genevieve frowned. “It was something to do with back pain, wasn’t it? And it was the way the array was structured that was the odd thing. Well—I don’t suppose you’ll find it odd, but we hadn’t seen anything like it before. Xavi, you never throw anything out, did you . . . ?”
The scholar with beribboned braids reached for an enormous binder of handwritten notes and flicked furiously for a while.
“Why do you want to know?” asked Yvonne.
“We’re trying to work out what Ysabel’s research thesis project was,” said Alys, which was true. “Her notes have gone missing.”
“And you think it was something worth poaching? Probably was,” said Theo sagely.
“Everyone knew Caudotte was going to be a brilliant healer. There’s nobody in our cohort like that.
Well, Xavi might scrape in as Dux Scolaris, if they ever stop mooning over Healer Dauvillier enough to listen to a word they say in rounds. ”
Xavi’s mouth twitched and they made a rude gesture.
“You all seem close.” Alys smiled to hide the pang of envy.
“We were a first-year tutorial group,” said Balenne. “I guess we just gelled? We’ve studied together ever since.”
That was rare. Tutorial groups and ward rotation groups were assigned and changed every term.
Scholars might still make an effort to study with friends, of course, but residence hall bedrooms had one chair and one tiny desk each, and the library’s group study rooms were limited and mostly used for magical practice.
There was far more tradition attached to the library carrels; you were encouraged to make one your own, to claim it, to make it part of yourself while you were at the Academie.
Alys pictured the rows and rows of enclosed spaces, the wooden barriers holding every individual apart from everyone else.
“Ah, here,” Xavi said, and slid a piece of paper over to Alys.
“Sorry, it’s probably not much help. I didn’t use proper notation, I was mostly trying to remember what Caudotte had said about invoking the patient’s own magic.
She was the patient. She had a sore back and let us have a go at using the technique to heal her, so that Gennie could get more confident at groupwork.
She wasn’t just brilliant, she was nice. ”
Alys tried and failed to tell herself that Ysabel Caudotte wouldn’t have done something like deliberately lift a heavy weight at an angle, in order to give herself an injury that she could then observe the healing of firsthand.
Alys was getting quite a sense of Ysabel through this investigation.
Brilliant, yes—nice, at times—and single-mindedly determined, always.
“Oh, that’s right. She didn’t assign us roles in the array,” said Yvonne, looking at Xavi’s notes.
“We all had to pretend we were the only healer working to ease the paravertebral spasm, but also make sure we were working absolutely in step. She said it was more difficult than one person directing and the others all standing support, but that it would make the healing go heaps faster.”
“Did it?” Alys asked.
“I guess so?” said Genevieve. “And I’d not felt a patient’s own magic take part in a group healing before. That was fascinating.”
Alys hadn’t heard of anything like that either, but that wasn’t saying much. Her level of knowledge was nowhere near the rest of her exam group’s. Still. It did smell of Ysabel Caudotte’s fondness for the new and experimental.
“It didn’t have anything to do with echo headaches?” she asked.
“No,” said Xavi.
“Well. Thank you.” Alys smiled at them all, and got enough smiles back that she decided to keep pushing.
“Speaking of brilliant scholars in my cohort—I don’t suppose there’s a chance any of you ran into Konrad Omeyer the evening before the Grand Exam?
In the self-defence gym, or near the Rondelle, or anywhere else? ”
A pause, and then— “Did Omeyer kill Caudotte?” said Theo, eyes widening further.
Alys winced. “I hope not. But Estiene’s in trouble over it, and he’s a friend.
” Was that true? Perhaps. It was more true than it had been a week ago.
“So if there’s anything you can think of that would help me rule other people in or out, I’d really appreciate it.
And don’t go spreading any rumours in the meantime,” she added hastily. “Will you promise?”
“Of course we will,” said Genevieve. “Won’t we, Theo?”
“Yes, yes.”
“I don’t even know what Omeyer looks like,” said Xavi. “Sorry.”
“I do,” said Yvonne. “And, um. Can you also not spread rumours, Tixerrant?”
It turned out that Yvonne’s sister was a first-year scholar and passed on all the gossip, and the entire first-year cohort knew that one of their number was seeing Konrad Omeyer.
Seeing might have been “fucking for future clout” or “passionately in love with”; Yvonne’s sister thought the former, because the scholar in question was a precocious ball of ambition and had apparently tried to seduce Estiene Marcelle first, then sulked because he hadn’t even noticed she was trying.
Alys thought about Estiene and Jehan on the mat of the fighting gym, and Moyna saying cock-struck, and managed not to smile.
Yvonne promised to see if she could drag any kind of alibi for Konrad out of the first-year gossip mill.
It would be useful to have an external source, at least. Konrad could easily have been lying to Alys yesterday, and could easily lie again if she kept asking him questions.
Anyone they’d spoken to up to this point could have lied.
Honestly, how did the gendarmes solve any murders at all?
Murderers in stage-plays broke down and confessed because the clever mystery-solver had backed them into a corner and trapped them in a web of their own deceit.
Alys headed back in the direction of the fifth-year hall.
That study group had lodged themselves in her thoughts: their ease with one another, their close-knit fondness.
There was an ache in Alys’s chest that she thought she’d grown out of—or at least learned to endure—when she was much younger and realising that the people she’d thought of as friends didn’t think of her the same way.
She’d been more or less content with her loneliness, before this week. Resigned to it.
She paused in the shadow of the North Tower and squinted upward.
Their new exam slot wasn’t for a couple of hours yet.
Alys changed direction and went out into the city. For the second time in two days, she took herself home.
Lady Tixerrant was there, this time. She was pleased to see Alys and also pleased at the idea of Alys throwing a little gathering for her Grand Exam group— “How thoughtful of you, darling. I’m sure they’ll appreciate how lucky they are to be in a group with you.”
Not a single person in that exam group had considered themself lucky to be stuck with Alys.
She didn’t say that. She thought about Clement Savoye’s bewitching mouth and clear eyes, and their fingers on the piano, and Estiene’s face full of defiance and fear.
She said, “I’ll need to talk to the kitchen staff. ”
Once she was done doing that, she went to bid her mother farewell and found her working through a pile of correspondence in her study.
Jammetta put down her pen at once and beckoned Alys closer.
“I was going to keep this as a surprise for after that little musical performance tomorrow, darling, but perhaps you’d like to see it now. ”
That little performance. Alys had a moment of enjoyment picturing Crespin Thumery and the Chancellor’s faces at hearing the Academie’s revered feast-day concert described thus.
She took the book her mother handed her: a fresh datebook, bound in handsome green-dyed leather, for the year ahead.
She flicked through it and found several appointments already recorded in her mother’s impeccable hand.
Some were the dinners and parties and gatherings Alys was used to making time for.
Some were the house-call appointments expected of a private healer.
“I’d thought . . .” Alys gathered herself. “Mama, I’d hoped I might have the summer off, before starting work. It’s traditional.”
“But it’s the busy end of the season!” her mother said.
“Everyone’s in town, Alys. You’ll be paying visits anyway.
And these people are doing you a favour, you know.
Not everyone will step away from their family healer for someone just starting out.
We mustn’t appear ungrateful.” She tapped her finger on the name of Lady Calonne.
Panic rose in a bubble. Alys couldn’t tell her mother what had happened yesterday morning in the Rondelle.
Even without the geas, the very idea . .
. no. Lady Tixerrant wouldn’t understand.
She had no patience for weakness. You had responsibilities, and you met them, come tempest or plague or social scandal.
Or nearly dying from your own magic, and being left terrified at the thought of using it again.
It was a useless feeling; Alys knew that.
She’d get past it. She had no choice. Konrad had fought for a year to get back to the Academie.
Healers afflicted by the serrage who were only sometimes incapacitated could still be found working on the wards of the Hospital.
Alys was a healer and healers had to work.
And she wanted it. She wanted to be a force for whatever good she could do.
“I thought,” Alys ventured, “I might also do some shifts at the Hospital’s courtyard clinic.”
“I suppose that would look admirable,” her mother said, after a moment.
“But why bother, darling? If you want to help the needy, throw a charity dinner. There are plenty of healers who can work there. There’s only one Alys Tixerrant.
” She stood and kissed Alys’s cheeks. She smelled of expensive roses and sweet ginger.
Something young in Alys wanted to curl up in the scent.
“It’s Mathé’s gift,” Alys said. She wasn’t used to being stubborn. She tried to imagine she was Ysabel, or Moyna. “It’s meant to be used for everyone.”
“Well, if you feel you must, then you shall. But you know how busy the end of the season is, Alys. You’ll not be giving yourself much chance to rest.”
Rest. Alys nearly laughed aloud at the very idea.