Thirty-One #2
Everyone looked at Clement. The discomfort of that many eyes was more of a memory than a true feeling.
Here, under the sky, on Mathé’s own night, with these people who had decided to care enough to find the truth for Clement’s best friend, they felt—steady, and seen, and strong.
And pleased, even, to be able to show off a little in a way that Ysabel would have grinned to see. Because . . .
“Ysabel liked to keep secrets and liked to show off,” they said.
“You all know that about her. If she thought she was on to something as big and groundbreaking as this, she’d immediately start thinking about how she could make the largest splash possible with her success.
I think she came up with this solution, whatever it is, by combining techniques from other diseases and other healing principles.
And so the best way to walk an audience through it, too, would be to show how any healer could reach the same conclusion if they understood and demonstrated the techniques that would be combined to make her technique. ”
“Except she decided to hedge her bets on that, with these letters,” said Jehan. “Maybe she realised we can’t be relied upon to be as brilliant as her.”
“Not even when she and Brodier handpicked the group for brilliance,” said Alys. “And . . . and for power.” A sheepish gesture at herself.
“Case one,” said Clement. “Hare fever. A phantome that doesn’t usually kill, but often produces echo symptoms affecting the joints, which are resistant to magical treatment.
Case two: a history of a phantome that interacts badly with magic, and for which we needed Jehan’s new half-under technique—which he’d told Ysabel all about—in order to treat a musculoskeletal issue. ”
Estiene looked like he was either going to sing joyfully or be sick. “Case three,” he said. “Another phantome, this one requiring a solo effort by a healer with a huge amount of power.”
“Which Ysabel knew you had,” said Clement to Alys. “And we know she’d been playing with the limitations on solo healings two years ago, because she tried it with Konrad: a new approach for Peizerat’s tremor. I read up on it after we talked to him. It’s another post-phantome syndrome.”
“If the serrage is a great solo healing and needs the kind of power only a few healers in the world have,” said Estiene, “no wonder nobody else has done it. And it’s not going to be much use if only Alys is capable of it, and only theoretically, and that’s the one case we’ve failed because she couldn’t.
I’m sorry, Alys, but Ysabel didn’t foresee that. ”
“I don’t think that’s what this says.” Moyna was now flipping back and forth rapidly, holding her places with fingers, comparing and frowning.
“The array looks— No, it’s not a solo. It’s just that it needs a shitload of power, and for some reason she’s only allowed for a five-body job.
Surely she’d just throw twenty healers at the problem and be done. ”
“Perhaps because there are only five people in an exam group?” Alys ventured. “If she was truly wedded to this plan of proof via the Grand Exam . . .”
“Not if there was a better option,” said Clement. “Not if it would be dangerous to us.”
And they wished very hard that they believed that, but a small part of them did wonder.
“Case four,” they went on. “The last piece. A condition producing painful spasm of the muscles, in which the body resists the healing, just as the serrage does. And which requires precise and prolonged work by a healer comfortable with traitor illnesses.”
“Muscle spasm?” said Alys, eyes widening.
“Mathé’s sacred spark,” said Moyna. “This is—”
“No, I want to work it out,” said Jehan suddenly. “If she thinks we could, then we can. Fuck your condescending little note, Ysabel Caudotte. Sorry, Clement.”
“It’s fine.” Clement could feel a smile, perhaps the first true one of the week, growing on their lips.
“We need paper.”
“We really need a blackboard.” Estiene swept Jehan’s bowl of nuts sideways to clear room on the table. “Moyna, in your enormous satchel— Yes, thanks.”
He took the pencil and notebook she offered and began writing fast. Jehan sat next to him and the two of them fell at once into an argumentative little world of their own, muttering and sketching and crossing things out.
Moyna offered Ysabel’s thesis to Clement, who took it and skim-read, full of half-happy half-sorrowful pride. That pride swelled within them and turned complicated as they hit the final pages and read Ysabel’s concluding explanation of the array.
“It only works on healers,” they said.
“Wait, what?” Estiene looked up.
Clement tapped a finger on Ysabel’s writing. “That’s what it says. The technique as it stands is only effective if the patient is a healing mage. Future work and development will be needed to generalise it to other populations, including non-healer mages.”
Estiene and Jehan exchanged a look that seemed to be the first half of a conversation. Indeed, Jehan burst out: “Yes, my technique would calm the patient’s magic down, but that’s an extra feature, not a limiting one—”
“Doesn’t matter, let’s see what it looks like,” said Estiene, scribbling again.
Clement left them to it. They turned the page again, because there was one left.
They looked at that page for a long time. After a while they swallowed a lump, and wrinkled their nose against the heat of imminent tears.
Then, as Estiene and Jehan were still going, they drank some more wine and cut some slices of summer-berry cake. They offered a slice to Alys in a napkin, and she took it with a smile. She was wearing the rabbit pendant again. It felt like a secret between them.
“Is that it?” Estiene demanded, when he and Jehan had argued their way to agreement. He pushed forward their array and outlined the suggested technique, finishing: “We really should be flattered that she thought we could manage it.”
“You’re close, but not quite,” said Clement, and held up the last page of the packet. Unlike the other sheets of paper, it was rough-edged and torn out of a notebook—Ysabel’s yellow notebook—and deeply creased from, one assumed, being folded into quarters and carried around.
The array and explanation on this page were different from those in the thesis. Jehan snatched it up and frowned at it, and then passed it around. Moyna swore some more.
“Oh,” said Alys, who had it last. “I’d been wondering how— Oh.
” And she told them, in another excited rush, about Ysabel working with a group of third-year scholars in winter term, on a technique to calm down the muscle spasm in a strained back, and the strangeness of how she got them to do it. It was another perfectly fitting piece.
Alys looked down at the array again. “And it’s rather beautiful, isn’t it? Truly like a song.”
“I don’t think we’d have gotten this on our own given twenty hours,” said Jehan. “It’s so fucking counterintuitive. No wonder she decided to give us the answers. This is probably the part that took her three years to crack.”
“And it explains why it’s only a five-body problem,” said Moyna. “Caudotte, you dead madwoman. Sorry, Clement.”
“I’m back to saying it’s impossible again,” said Estiene. “She didn’t even test it, did she? All those bits and pieces, yes, but not all of it together. There’s no way it’d have stayed secret.”
“It looks like it’d work,” said Moyna. “If the healers in question can do it.”
“If, if,” said Clement. “But if we can. If the serrage could be cured, even if it’s only in healers for now . . .”
Then hundreds of healers could go back to work; untold numbers of patients would be helped and healed, who were currently waiting too long or never being healed at all.
And if Ysabel’s work could be built upon and one day the serrage could be cured in everyone, there were thousands of people out there who could be pulled back from lives of fluctuating pain and spasm.
And the story, perhaps, could shift. Healers were not the selfish, arrogant mages who’d drawn the serrage to Sieuxerr and then failed to fix it.
They were just people—people who’d done their best, in a time when the best demanded of them was more than ever before, and had paid the price not for their failings but for their strengths.
For staying by the sides of patients with a contagious phantome.
For pushing and pushing through their own symptoms until it became impossible.
The serrage would become just another come-and-gone plague in the history of the world. A problem triumphantly solved.
Clement met Alys’s gaze and had the feeling that they’d only ever experienced with Ysabel herself: that their thoughts had followed the same path and ended up in the same place.
“There’s our motive,” said Alys. “Brodier said that Ysabel’s research wasn’t complete, that someone else would have to finish it, but .
. . if she went to the effort of letting Ysabel pick our exam group and make us sit different cases than everyone else, she must have known it was complete, and about to be proven.
And in the meantime she’s learned she won’t keep her job off the back of simply supervising a scholar who cured the serrage, but if the cure was put forward as hers—”
It would make anyone’s career. It would make them a legend.