Thirty-One #3
“And she told everyone Ysabel was working on echo headaches,” said Clement, “and stole the notebook so nobody could prove otherwise.”
“Mathé’s fucking blazing spark,” said Jehan. “My head hurts. All right. So Brodier decides to take the credit herself, and—stops Ysabel’s heart and shoves her off a balcony to smash her skull—sorry—”
“Sorry, Clement,” said Clement.
Jehan grinned sheepishly. “Why did she wait until the night before the Grand Exam, though? If she and Ysabel had already agreed on the setup, and she had Ysabel’s notes? And why leave the body where she knew we’d find it the next morning?”
“I suppose . . . it’s a place to stage an impromptu suicide, without being seen,” said Moyna. “Dragging a body to the top of the North Tower to throw it off there would be asking to be seen by all the fourth- and fifth-years coming back from the library to go to bed.”
“And remember the midnight lockdown,” said Clement. “Depending on what time it was, she might not have had time to do anything more complex than tip Ysabel over the edge and get herself out.”
They were all speaking quickly now, excitement building. After days of answers slipping from their grasp, this was like suddenly catching hold of a rope.
Alys looked caught up in it too, but she lifted a hand and said, clearly trying to be fair, “Dean Brodier is the one who insisted the gendarmes were called, and that they come back at the end of the week to ask all their questions.”
“But in the meantime, the gendarmes have been given an answer they like,” said Estiene. “Me.”
“Yes,” said Moyna. “Did Artificer Decroy actually try to blackmail Brodier, do we think, or was that entirely about framing the Marcelles?”
“The note in my pigeonhole wasn’t addressed to anyone by name,” Estiene said.
“What if he did overhear Brodier and Ysabel in the Rondelle that night, and send it to Brodier originally, to try and get something out of her for his silence—money, I assume? Or leverage for the artificers’ strike and the Academie’s contracts?
She could have copied it out for me, or altered only the meeting time, so that she could meet him first, kill him, and then have me stumble in. ”
Silence. Estiene had reached the same conclusion that Clement had.
“That’s cold-blooded,” said Alys softly. “I don’t like to think any healer could do that. And over a job?”
“Over keeping your job and not being branded a murderer and life-bonded into the worst parts of the work,” Jehan said.
“The only thing that makes a healer is being born a mage in the wrong spot,” said Moyna wearily.
“Nobody cares a drop for who you are as a person. And then you’re trained paper-thin and sent out to work until you’re practically transparent, and in the meantime half the people you’re trying to help blame you for a plague and the other half are complaining because that plague took a chunk of your coworkers out of the clinics entirely. ”
Clement shifted uneasily. They hoped that they never became as cynical as Moyna had managed to become before even graduating, but they also couldn’t argue with anything she’d said.
“All right, we have some answers. But what do we do with them?” said Estiene.
“My father might believe us, but anything he or I do, we’ll still be accused of making things up unless there’s proof.
We’ve got one lie from Brodier about echo headaches, which she can deny ever telling, and a notebook she can claim was planted or even completely fabricated.
And there’s no evidence that she killed the artificer, either, except that she’d know about the faculty meeting time and would have easy access and keys to the knocking room. ”
“And if we do the final case to Ysabel’s instructions, if we cure the serrage, we’ve finished Brodier’s job for her, and she gets heralded as a genius,” said Jehan. “She’s Dean of Assessment, and she knows the technique. It’d be very believable that this tailored exam was all her own idea.”
“I don’t know,” said Clement slowly. They picked up the torn, creased notebook page.
“We have Ysabel’s letters. And we have this.
It’s Ysabel all over. Secrets within secrets.
Maybe she suspected Brodier might try to—publish, at least, before Ysabel could claim the work as her own.
So she took the most unexpected part of the solution and kept it to herself. ”
“You think Brodier might not know this part?” Alys said.
Clement ran their fingertip along the crease, and looked again at Ysabel’s familiar handwriting.
A brilliant, unexpected song of an array.
Something that you might only think of if you hadn’t spent years grinding yourself into the grooves and ridges of what was known, accepted, the way-it’s-always-been.
It took energy and hope, as well as a mind like Ysabel’s, to take a step this wide.
They thought of Brodier, exhausted and bitter in the clinic, talking about the hours of work and the rewards of seniority.
Brodier saying, Someone has to stand at the head.
“I think not,” they said. “And I have an idea of how we can prove it.”