Thirty-Two
We’ve all had to accept that the level of magic in the average healer is not what it once was.
What’s done is done. However, it appals me that standards of publication have slipped to the point where one healer, of clearly narrow and overpaid experience, can constitute an “array,” let alone that they consider it worth devoting time to a new technique for smoothing wrinkles.
The world is a harsher and sicker place since our ranks were thinned by the serrage.
That there are still healers allowed to practice solely in private, for the anxious rich, is one of the reasons we’re hated. And I can see why.
—From a Letter to the Editor in the Annals of Mathé’s Art
By the time Clement had finished talking, night had properly fallen around them.
The lanterns cast pools of light onto the table and illuminated the food, the glasses of wine like collected blood, and the loveliness of Clement’s mouth as they outlined a plan that was as good as anything from a stage-play after all.
The details, though, began lining Alys’s stomach with dread.
Along with that she had her usual hostess anxiety, which noted that she should ask everyone to eat the meats and the cheese tarts before much longer; she hadn’t remembered ice-boxes to keep everything fresh.
Even Jehan had stopped eating in favour of listening, his arm resting motionless on the table against Estiene’s. When Clement was finished, Estiene lifted a hand to tug at the short ends of his hair.
“I hate to say it, again,” he said, “but there’s a good chance we can’t manage this.
That we fuck it all up, even with practice.
And if we do, we’ll be fucking up with an audience—if Brodier knows we’re on to her, she can justify failing us, and do as much as she can to poison our careers before she gets restructured out of a job.
She could make an argument to the gendarmes and the Committee for Healer Workforce that it’s in the city’s best interest for our whole group to be labour-bonded, for the crime of attempting to cover up two murders.
” He looked around. “You don’t all have to go down with me. ”
“Scholar Marcelle,” said Moyna. “Is that selflessness I hear?”
“Fuck off,” said Estiene, and downed his entire glass of wine.
“Nobody here is letting you take the fall,” said Jehan.
“It’s a good plan, Clement,” said Alys. She swallowed past the dryness in her throat and the headache behind her bloodied eye, which was threatening to return.
You’re an echo, she told it. You’re not real anymore.
“But you know that even if it goes perfectly—by the Academie’s own policies, there’s a good chance we have to repeat the year. ”
“I shouldn’t be the deciding vote on that one,” said Moyna dryly.
“Nor should I,” said Alys. “I wouldn’t care much.” Another year to learn, and to properly ask for the help she needed? Yes. She could live with that.
“I would care a lot,” said Estiene. “But it’s still better than being life-bonded.” He hesitated. “Jehan? There’s letting me take the fall, and there’s keeping yourself in a trap. Only one of us gets out of this easily.”
Jehan looked as if he’d run at speed into a closed door he thought was open. His arm twitched next to Estiene’s.
“What does that mean?” said Clement. “What trap?”
“Gnnh,” said Jehan miserably.
“If you’re still keeping secrets that could affect the rest of us, now, after you made me tell everyone about the first case . . .” said Moyna, and Jehan’s misery crescendoed into a groan.
“Fine! Fine. You’re right.”
And Jehan told them: about a man called Guion Blavot, and Jehan being caught up in his own private narrative of blackmail and illegal healing work, and how Jehan desperately needed to slip free of the city. Which he could only do if they passed and graduated.
True fear sat comfortably on Alys; she was used to it. It looked like an unwieldy visitor on Jehan. Alys bit her lip. They were so close to being harmonious, so close to agreement, but Estiene was right. The stakes weren’t the same for all of them. Either way this fell out, someone lost.
Jehan looked around at all of them in the silence.
Then he made a rueful face and shrugged.
“Fuck it,” he said, crisp. “At least we’re all alive. We do it the way Ysabel would have wanted. Let’s get her the grand spectacle and the credit she deserves, and live with the consequences of our own stupid decisions. We have to try.”
Estiene let out a loud breath. It was his hand twitching toward Jehan’s, this time.
“Yes,” said Moyna. “And now that’s settled, can we please pretend, for a few hours, that we’re a normal exam group and we’re nearly done with our time at the Academie, and this is a normal Lantern Night in which we can all make our lanterns and talk about things that have nothing to do with murder. And get drunk.”
Alys usually disliked the sensation of being drunk.
It made her duller, slower to observe and comprehend the people and social currents around her.
She weighed that dislike against the dread of tomorrow.
More than just a single exam case—more than their passing the Grand Exam, even—now hinged on her ability to do what Ysabel had thought her capable of, with the power she’d always been terrified to use.
Perhaps she’d explode her eyeball right in its socket, this time. Perhaps she’d fail them all.
Jehan was right, though. She had to try.
Drinking it was.
Alys pulled from the shadowed place where she’d stashed it the bottle of Grande Lisse she’d purloined from her family’s cellar.
She’d intended to save this for after midnight, but why wait?
They should gulp down whatever happiness they could.
Sticky dust came off on her fingertips and she wiped them on her overdress while Estiene caught sight of the label and choked.
“What?” said Clement. “I assume it’s something absurdly good and expensive.”
“And old,” said Estiene. “It’s brandy. I didn’t think they even sold these bottles outside the royal family.”
“They don’t,” said Alys.
“Lovely,” said Jehan. He, too, pulled a bottle from under his chair, and added it to the table with a flourish. “This is rum. It’s sold in every shop in the city to any drunkard who staggers in off the street, it cost me very little money, and it probably tastes like socks soaked in vanilla.”
“Lovely,” said Alys solemnly. “Mathé’s luck to us all.”
“Now that,” said Estiene, reaching for the Grande Lisse, “I’ll drink to.”
No matter who you were, you made your own lantern for midnight.
Alys’s mother always had the best materials available at the Tixerrant party, and Alys had ransacked the fresh-bought supplies at the same time as the kitchen and the cellar.
She had a basket containing fine wire, pots of glue with soft flat brushes, stacks of tissue paper in every shade of blue, and tiny firebricks made of the lightweight Matorran beach stone that the fire-mages used for their qualification pins.
“No patterns?” Clement said, digging in the basket.
“We are grown adults and fifth-year scholars of the Academie Sieuxerr, Scholar Savoye,” said Alys. “Our lanterns fly or burn by the work of our own minds and hands.”
“I hope you’re ready to see mine burn sadly on the stones, then.” But they sat down and began cutting. There were some basic shapes that everyone knew. Patterns were sold for those who felt like being technical or adventurous.
As they worked, the conversation reached a fairly normal place for Lantern Night: everyone’s personal tallies of successful lanterns versus those gone to ignoble fire before they were out of sight.
Before the dark hour, you spoke of the past.
Most Sieuxerran children were expected to have a few failures before the year when their personal lanterns first lifted, stayed intact, and joined the mass of them heading toward the stars.
Moyna commented that it probably made a difference when you could afford Matorran firebricks instead of cotton soaked in alcohol.
Alys, who had already finished a glass of brandy by then, threw a bunch of tissue offcuts at Moyna’s head, and laughed from her stomach when Moyna looked like an offended sparrow.
“Even last year mine went to flame before it had risen a few yards,” said Jehan. “So did yours, if you’ll remember.”
“I was distracted by a tall, chatty pest, and had to scramble it together last minute, if you’ll remember,” said Estiene. “The glue didn’t have time to dry.”
Jehan’s smile came out like a very suggestive moon. He pulled back his glue-brush, making a show as if to flick it onto Estiene, and Estiene said, “I will douse your lantern and your head in that hideous rum, Jehan,” without even looking up.
Clement, next to Alys, made a stifled sound that was as eloquent a comment as Moyna’s renewed eye-rolling. Alys giggled and reached for the wire.
After the lanterns were half-done and set aside to dry, they resumed eating, and talked determinedly of other things.
Moyna Apprice under the influence of Jehan’s terrible rum was something to be seen; Alys nudged Estiene and murmured that Moyna could give his grandmother a run for her money, and Estiene dissolved into sputtering laughter and did an even funnier rendition of how that conversation would go.
Then the glue on the paper was dry and the lanterns could be carefully expanded, the wires pulled into place, and the firebricks attached.
Alys’s father had instilled in her a quiet competitiveness when it came to lanterns; she lost herself in the details, adding some shimmering dust for decoration and some ribbons to the top.
When she next looked up, Clement was helping Jehan carry an enormous and slightly lopsided lantern over to a clear space, and Estiene and Moyna were sitting together, glasses in hand, on the low wall that ran all the way around the tower’s edge.
Jehan said, “Mathé’s arse, I’d better go make sure nobody else gets pushed off a roof— Sorry, Cl—”