Thirty #2
“What do you want to focus on for the healing today?” Estiene asked Clement. “The thyroid’s localised, but it’ll be the hardest to get past the body’s response. The blood probably needs daily treatment for a week. Or weekly for a few months, that’d be better.”
“Hands and feet?” said Clement. “They seem to be interfering the most with your life, Urzula, is that right?”
“If you kids can fix my hands and feet, I’ll get down and kiss yours,” said Urzula, then made a face. “Scholars. Not kids. They did go over the protocol twenty times or so, but I was distracted. I’m not meant to be talking this much, am I?”
“You’re fine,” said Jehan, sending her a wink. His personal terror of being a military mage notwithstanding, Urzula seemed fun.
“I’ll take anchor,” said Estiene. “I might be only the third strongest in the room,” dryly, “but Apprice is exhausted and Tixerrant—took the last one. There are no marks for refusing to use the resources we have. I’m a good healer.
I’ll do it.” Estiene was looking up at the gallery.
I belong here, he might as well have shouted.
I don’t need corruption or cheating or murder to prove it.
Urzula settled herself on the floor and closed her eyes as Clement chalked out the array: so simple it was barely necessary, but they needed to do everything by the book. Clement themself took monitoring, which meant that Jehan and Alys were on support, pushing magic into Estiene.
Alys put her hand on Estiene’s shoulder readily enough, but when Jehan laid his on hers, he could feel her shaking.
“Tixerrant,” he said quietly, “do I need to be diagnosing— Oh, shit.”
Alys’s chest heaved and she put her free hand to her throat, then stepped quickly out of the array, eyes wide and fearful. Jehan’s fear that this was some kind of delayed worsening of her burnout simmered down when it became clear that she was only panicking.
Only.
Alys made a frustrated sound and dropped her head into her hands.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said. “Even—gathering my magic to begin— It’s just support, I know, but my body doesn’t know—”
“And you’re allowed to listen to it,” said Clement.
“But—” said Estiene.
“You and Fortier will manage. There are also no marks for forcing the use of resources we don’t need.
And we only have half of the hour left, so it makes sense to divide efforts anyway.
Tixerrant and Apprice can plan a general treatment course for a traitor illness affecting the blood—I agree, let’s say weekly sessions.
” Clement turned their inarguable face onto Estiene, who cast another glance up at the gallery curtains and then nodded.
Alys, still looking miserable with guilt, went to sit against the wall with Moyna.
So it was Jehan’s turn to put his hand on Estiene’s shoulder. A brief tensing, and then Estiene looked up at him. Close. He was so fucking beautiful.
Jehan said, “Uh.”
“Just keep it steady,” said Estiene. He hummed a clear, low note. “Savoye will nudge you back on if you need it. You know how it goes: We know best, the body is betrayed, we have to force it to listen to us.”
“Sure,” said Jehan. “Simple.”
“Savoye?”
Clement said, “Let’s begin.”
It was not simple.
Jehan hadn’t honestly expected it to be—a traitor illness, fuck, he’d almost have preferred another obscure phantome.
And his position in the array wasn’t the most difficult one.
But healing took absolute focus, and when you were anchoring at least you were focusing exclusively on the pitch of your magic and the tug from one bodily state to another.
Jehan’s mind didn’t have enough to do. It kept trying to wander off the note and the picture of health he was trying to maintain.
He swore under his breath when his magic faltered and he felt the backwash of it, sharp as a bite at his fingertips, and a wobble in the delicate work Estiene was doing with the muscles and tendons of the forearms. Clement repeated the note of the healing, loud and urgent.
“Relax your control, Fortier,” said Estiene, breathless with effort. “I can’t fight you and the disease both.”
Jehan gritted his teeth. It seemed like it’d make things worse: focus less, try less?
But he did his best to become no more than an open gate, a wellspring of magic, and the tension settled.
It also gave him a clearer sense of what Estiene was doing in the patient’s body: the steely, fuck-you willpower that was holding a better normal in mind and forcing the tense muscle fibres to relax into what the body thought was an abnormal looseness.
“Right hand done,” said Estiene, finally. “Left hand next.”
“Overachiever,” Jehan muttered, but didn’t falter. And didn’t falter when Estiene, after checking the clock and finding seven minutes left, insisted on also getting a start on the right foot.
Clement called a halt with three minutes on the clock and turned to Alys and Moyna, who quickly talked Urzula—now flexing her hands delightedly—through their plan for the rest of her treatment at the Hospital.
Explaining treatment to patients was not often part of exam cases.
Alys and her smile were remarkably good at it.
The bell rang. Urzula disappeared back into the centre of the Rondelle. And their exam group, all looking as battered and tired as Jehan felt, stepped out not into a bright morning but into the golden light of evening.
Someone was waiting for them after all, but it wasn’t a Berthelmi’s messenger.
A girl with a green first-year sash leapt up from the ground.
She was bursting with pride to tell Alys that she’d spoken to her sister’s friend’s mage-tester’s barber’s cousin, or something, and Konrad Omeyer had been shut up in his own room studying the night before the Grand Exam, but he’d been kept company the whole time—eyebrow waggle—by a first-year scholar called Lizette Roy.
Who was the type to boast about it, but not the type to lie on someone else’s behalf.
So Konrad wasn’t entirely allergic to human company after all. And probably wasn’t a murderer.
Alys bestowed her smile on this news-bringer and thanked her warmly, and the girl floated off as if she’d been given a burst of illegal fighting-gym magic to the neuromuscular fibres.
“Now we can open Ysabel’s letter,” said Jehan. “And I reserve the right to rip it into pieces if she’s smug about that fucking nightmare of a case.”
“I left it in my room,” said Moyna. “If we’re not cheating, we’re not bringing answers into the exam chamber. I’ll fetch it. Where should we . . . ?”
“It’s Lantern Night.” Alys played with the embroidery at her cuffs, then twisted her hands together. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to, but I thought—if you don’t mind missing the general hall party—would you all like to come to mine?”
“Your party?” said Estiene. “You mean your family’s party?” He looked as if he’d rather plunge his hand into a basket of needles than expose himself to the upper levels of Sieuxerran society at the moment.
“No,” said Alys. “I’m throwing us our own party. Just us, so we can talk everything over, for as long as it takes. I reserved us the roof of the North Tower.”
“You what?” said Moyna.
“I’ve already ransacked my family’s supplies for lantern materials. And,” she finished, with a grin, “there’ll be food and drink. Lots of it. If that helps, Jehan.”
Jehan grinned back. It was turning into a cloudless evening, cool enough to be comfortable, promising a spectacular night. All their problems still existed. But they’d made it through one more exam case, and they had some answers in hand.
Perhaps the spirits were finally beginning to smile on them after all.
“I am easily bought with food,” he declared. “Lead the way.”