Thirty-Two #2
“Jehan, I’ll personally help Estiene push you off a roof if you keep apologising,” said Clement.
“Got it, maestre.” Jehan bowed and grabbed his bottle of rum to take over to the others. It was only half full by now.
Alys was the last to finish her lantern. She took three tries to attach her firebrick and giggled more every time. She kept remembering what tomorrow would hold, and what was expected of her, but she’d had enough brandy that it felt like touching a hot stone with very thick gloves.
“Done,” she said at last, and put the lantern down carefully at her feet. Her head spun a little when she straightened.
“All right?” Clement said.
“It’s really good brandy,” said Alys.
“It really is,” Clement agreed. “Still. Are you all right?”
“That’s too large a question for tonight,” said Alys. “Ask me again this time tomorrow.”
Clement tilted their head, glowing and extraordinary in the lamplight, and smiled at Alys. It was a very particular and promising smile. “I will,” they said. “Let’s find a smaller question. Do you want some water?”
“You can sober me up,” said Alys incoherently, and extended her arm.
She realised her mistake when Clement didn’t laugh, didn’t demur, but took hold of her wrist as if Alys were a lantern already lit and fragile with warm air.
Their fingers moved on Alys’s pulse and all the brandy in Alys told her that it would go up in a flame of sheer lust. She’d had a thought about violin chin-rests, hadn’t she?
Now she thought of harps and pianos. Clement had perfect pitch. Clement would play her to perfection.
Clement kept smiling and their grip shifted. Not clinical. Warm and undemanding. Still a promise, but one played to a slow tempo.
“Sorry, Scholar Tixerrant,” said Clement. “I’m a fifth-year scholar of the Academie Sieuxerr. I couldn’t possibly use Mathé’s gift on something so frivolous.”
Alys took her arm back and managed a laugh.
“Half the private healers in the city will be doing house calls tomorrow morning for the rich who have overindulged on Lantern Night and want their headaches to go away, and probably the broken capillaries on their noses to be fixed as well,” she said.
“Nothing’s frivolous when you’re paid enough. ”
Clement began to say something, then stopped. Their keen gaze took in Alys, who allowed herself to meet it without the buffer: without thinking about instruments or brandy or anything but the person in front of her.
“Are you still intending to go into private practice? Now you know what you can do?”
“I don’t know what I can do,” said Alys. “I seem to have barely tapped the amount of things I can’t do.”
“It’s your magic. Your career,” said Clement. “But Ysabel was right—you should be the best of us, you should be something enormous and extraordinary. Over the summer, perhaps we—”
“Hey,” said Jehan, passing by the table after fetching more food. He gently swatted Clement’s head, shifting their white headband half an inch askew. “The lights are still up, no talking about the summer yet. Touch blue.”
Clement patted their mantelet. Alys thought, Enormous and extraordinary.
The next moment, the faint boom of the old town hall’s clock rolled across the night, and the first of the city’s lights began to go out.
Estiene scrambled for the lanterns on the table, and Alys and Jehan, as the two tallest, quickly extinguished the strings of hanging lights.
“Everyone’s lantern to hand?” Alys asked, pausing before the last one. “Matches in your pocket?”
A chorus of assent. Alys pinched her fingers and brought down the darkness.
One hour to midnight. One hour before Mathé’s own feast day.
In the dark hour, healers and non-healers alike commemorated the inevitability and the despair of death.
In the depths of it, fifth-year scholars could speak of the summer and the future without the risk of bad luck.
Plans and hopes for the future were what the lanterns were all about.
“It still feels depressing,” said Moyna. She was a starless outline against the dark sky. Alys’s vision was still adjusting. “Given how tomorrow could go. Can’t we just finish the brandy and think about death?”
“Which wouldn’t be depressing at all,” said Estiene.
Alys thought not only of Ysabel’s letter to herself, but of all the letters, and the whole wild project of the serrage. Even if Alys lived another hundred years, she’d never have the kind of spirit that would look at a problem like that head-on and think herself capable of fixing it.
For the first time Alys wondered what Ysabel Caudotte would have become, sparkling so bright and so hard. If time and pressure would have turned her into something like Mathilde Brodier: resentful, and cynical, and forgetting that what healers do is not about themselves. Not really.
Five years of exhaustion and fear had narrowed Alys’s thoughts about the future. She took a deep breath and tried to prise them wide.
She said, “Not the immediate future, then. If you could do anything, change anything about—healing, the Hospital, the Academie—what would it be?”
“I assume I can’t wave my hand and expand the region that produces healers, so there are thousands more of us and we all get to have a nap and reasonable working hours,” said Jehan.
“Let’s say you have the power to make decisions, not wreak miracles,” said Alys.
“More money and priority when it comes to nonmagical options,” said Estiene, sudden and assured.
“There aren’t thousands more of us, and the difference between us and not-us shouldn’t be so stark.
More creativity when it comes to what medics can do.
More development of tonics instead of relying on the same ones we’ve used for centuries.
More diagnostics that isn’t magic-based.
Healers should be doing only the smallest part of our job that nobody else can do, for the cases where it makes the most difference. ”
Alys wished she could see everyone’s faces. Nobody was expecting that sort of answer from Estiene Marcelle of all people.
“That was going to be mine,” said Clement.
“Or something similar. Hm. If we can choose what gets research and money, I’d make us less needed in the first place.
How do phantomes spread, and how do we stop it happening?
And we already know that people who’ve never been well-fed or lived in good-quality housing are harder to heal, and have less chance of surviving almost everything.
Put some serious resources toward making people well before they get sick.
Feed them. Educate them. Look after them. ”
A whistle of appreciation from Jehan, who then said, “I’m still thinking. Moyna?”
“The Grand Exam is stupid,” said Moyna.
“Oh, excellent,” said Clement. “Keep going.”