Thirty
It was a bold choice on the part of the editor to group these conditions together, and one might say an arrogant choice to give them a new label.
These so-called traitor illnesses are familiar to any healer, and notorious for their difficulty, as the body resists the pull back to a “normal” that it believes it is already asserting.
No fresh methods of treatment are set forth in these pages.
The reasoning behind the new name for these diseases—that they represent the body turning on itself—could also be seen as a fit of pique that they so stubbornly resist the efforts of even a healer so illustrious as the editor.
—From a review of A New Overview of Healing Magic, published in the Annals of Mathé’s Art
The sun was in a different place in the sky, and skulked behind the Rondelle on its way back to the horizon instead of greeting them directly.
A simple change in their exam time shouldn’t have made Jehan this unsettled; so much so that he’d found himself the first one there, early, for perhaps the first time in his life.
Not that anything else was making him feel unsettled, of course.
Not the crumpled note from Blavot which he’d tossed onto his desk and was trying very hard not to think about, not the prospect of failing the Grand Exam itself, not the dangling mystery of Ysabel’s death and the artificer’s murder. And not Estiene Marcelle.
“If you’re trying to copy Estiene’s slutty hairstyle out of idiotic romantic solidarity, you’ve got your work cut out for you if you insist on using your teeth.”
Jehan dropped the end of his braid and gave Moyna a half-hearted glare.
He played with it often enough, but hadn’t chewed his hair since he was a child.
Mathé’s arse, this week was wrecking him.
He was about to retort—who knew what—but Clement was approaching as well, and Alys’s golden head was visible just emerging from the quad, and he didn’t need his idiotic romantic anything being fodder for the whole exam group.
“Look at us, so prompt and early,” said Alys.
“I don’t see Estiene,” said Moyna. “Do you think—”
“He’ll be here,” said Jehan. “He’d never miss the Grand Exam.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to say, we should hold off on swapping news until everyone’s here. Estiene included.”
“You have news?” Alys brightened. Her eye was still that horrid red, but she looked otherwise perfect. “So do I. Oh, can’t we just . . . repeat it, when Estiene is here?”
Clement began to speak, but stopped. They raised their eyebrows invitingly at Moyna, who told Clement and Alys about what she and Jehan had discovered in the bodykeeping hall: the identical magic around the hearts of the two victims, and how different burnout had felt.
And the fact that Thoury had caught her there.
It was probably for the best that Estiene wasn’t there to hear that, just before heading into an exam case.
“And now Gendarme Captain Thoury wants Moyna to diagnose murdered people for him,” Jehan couldn’t resist adding. “On a permanent basis.”
Captain Thoury, it turned out, had a nephew who was a healer: mediocre in most ways, but sharing Moyna’s tolerance for sending magic through the dead.
He’d always thought it was because of his low level of magic, which had barely scraped him into the Academie in the first year that they expanded the cohort numbers to compensate for the loss of healer workforce in the serrage.
Thoury had seen the possibilities in his nephew’s ability, but at the time hadn’t been able to argue for a healer to be removed from vital clinic work and assigned to the gendarmerie, and then his nephew had gotten married and moved to the north of Rese anyway.
It was an absurd thought. A healer of Moyna’s calibre, not working as a healer? Using her gifts to work out how people had died, instead of preventing them from dying in the first place? Jehan wasn’t particularly religious, but it still made him squirmy.
“But you’re bonded, aren’t you?” said Alys. “To somewhere in Camar?”
“Yes,” said Moyna. “I’d have to do my five years there, and then come back.
Thoury has some influence, but I don’t know that even he can argue I’m worth the hassle of trying to find someone else to send in my place right now.
Sieuxerr could send someone city-bonded, with the right incentive, but they couldn’t charge any extra for it—Greteford’s already paid my five years of fees.
And not that many healers speak decent Camarran. ”
Her voice was level. Jehan thought about her desire to stay in Sieuxerr, and what little he knew about Moyna’s anthem-lark relationship with her family, who would have raised Moyna on the expectation that she’d give far, far more than five years of her life to the city that had sent them there in the first place.
He wanted desperately to ask her more about it. So did Alys, by the look of her.
“There’s Estiene,” said Clement.
The other exam groups of the final slot had also arrived during Moyna’s telling, and were shooting curious looks at the four of them: not the usual group for this room, at this time.
These looks doubled in intensity when Estiene arrived.
He strode as if he were trying to squash a horde of rye-locusts beneath each step. He wore pearls and gold in his ears.
“Now who’s the one who’s late,” said Jehan.
He’d meant it as a sort of joke, to pretend things were normal, but it sounded sour and weak. And Estiene barely rose to it; his mouth turned down and he didn’t look at Jehan at all. Jehan’s heart struck a knell of despair.
No, that was the bell ringing for the start of the case.
There was a general shuffling and back-straightening among the scholars assembled outside.
Jehan had a moment of forceful, ugly envy of their fellow fifth-years, who were worried about nothing more than the stakes of possibly failing to graduate or failing to get the job they wanted.
“Oh, Jehan,” said Alys, “you were meeting with—”
“No time,” said Clement. “Let’s focus on the exam.”
Their fourth patient was a woman with tattoos curling over a shaved scalp, whose dark colouring and comfortable curves somehow made the patient gown look like a stylish nightgown.
She was clearly fascinated to be part of the Grand Exam; she presented Jehan with the question and then sat upright on the edge of her chair, watching them expectantly.
Jehan read, “This patient has a traitor illness. Determine through history and diagnostic magic which body systems are most affected. Heal one manifestation through use of whatever array you determine is best. Then develop a plan for a full treatment course and explain it to the patient.”
“Oh, no problem at all,” muttered Estiene, soft enough that their examiners wouldn’t hear.
They exchanged looks. That was a huge amount of work for an hour-long exam. Jehan’s confidence began to evaporate.
“It’ll be fine,” said Clement firmly. “We play to our strengths. Apprice?”
Moyna had admitted that she was magically tired from her work in the bodykeeping hall; she’d be able to participate in an array, but not anchor one, and didn’t want to be responsible for primary diagnostics as well.
She would take history—Estiene, diagnostics—and the others would handle the healing.
At least they could develop the plan as a group.
The patient had a heavy accent. She introduced herself as Urzula, and turned out to be a military movement-mage from central Tatranca.
Jehan wanted to pause everything and pepper her with questions, or at least ask her to make her chair fly around the room for them.
Maybe they could pretend it was a clinical test.
Her symptoms had been worsening for the past six months, to the point where she’d been allowed to leave her company and come to Sieuxerr to seek healing: muscle aches and a slowing of her movements, sometimes waking up with her hands or feet in painful spasm.
She was the right age for a lot of the traitor illnesses, and it turned out an aunt had suffered something similar but never been successfully treated.
Jehan was already alert for how this case fitted alongside the others they’d done. Generalised musculoskeletal symptoms, like hare fever. A difficult healing requiring a lot of sheer power, like vermeil. Everyone hated traitor illnesses—did that count?
“I think there’s a blood component as well as the muscles,” said Estiene, after several minutes of diagnostics. “Have you been bruising more easily? Bleeding more?”
Urzula informed them that no army would let its mages anywhere near the stabbing part of a battle, but maybe she had bled more during her last victory tattoo. Her monthly courses? Come to think of it, she hadn’t bled at all for a few months.
“Could you be pregnant?” asked Clement.
“I’d be able to tell,” said Estiene indignantly, over Urzula’s laughter and some Tatrancan slang which, by the accompanying gestures, meant she exclusively fucked people who didn’t have the equipment for that.
“Marcelle,” said Jehan formally, and touched his own throat. “Anything in the thyroid?”
Another long stretch. “Subtle, but yes,” Estiene said. “Mathé’s bones, this is going to be one of the messy harper’s flail collections, isn’t it?”
Clement took over Urzula’s wrist and agreed with Estiene. “If they hadn’t told us it’s a traitor, I’d have assumed another phantome. She must have had enough initial treatment to rule other things out.”
Harper’s flail had an outlandish name and a nearly two-page list of possible symptoms, which usually meant “we have no fucking idea what’s going on here” in research language.
And it was, of course, fiendishly hard to treat.
To hold an idea of wholeness and health in the mind was simple when it was a broken bone being healed; to hold an idea that the body refused to believe, and fought you on, because it thought it was already doing the right thing, was exhausting.