Thirty-Two #3
“The whole way we’re trained should be overhauled.
Nobody should be destroying themself as a point of pride.
In fact—no—no, that’s not my answer.” Her voice firmed.
“I’d make it that nobody has to be a healer at all.
No matter what. You can be mage-tested and given the choice, and at any point in training or working you can decide not to.
Wringing the greatest amount of possible benefit out of the resources that exist .
. . it doesn’t justify putting us all in a harness and never letting us out. ”
“Hey, we said no miracles,” said Jehan. The dark outline of him put a hand on Moyna’s shoulder.
“I don’t think you’re wrong. But in the meantime—all right, we can’t make more of us, but we can surely make the access to us more fair.
It shouldn’t matter how much money you have or who your family is.
Everyone should have to use free clinics.
That’d make the Grand Duchy’s governing committee improve the clinics in a hurry. ”
“Alys?” said Clement.
“Jehan’s was mine too,” said Alys. “And forget the committee and the general tax fund—if my parents’ friends had to rely only on the Hospital, they’d pay personally to improve it.”
“Down with the rich,” said Jehan, and yawned. “Nothing personal, Alys.”
“But it’s personal if it’s Estiene?” said Alys. She was in the mood to prod a bit.
“Yes,” said Jehan. “Down with you, Estiene. And only you.”
“Someone take that rum away from him,” said Estiene.
They spun futures that Ysabel Caudotte might have been proud of. At a quarter to the hour there was a single resonant chime from beneath them, as the smallest of the bronze bells called the silence before the light. Alys breathed and watched the stars and thought, Be brave.
She reached out in the dark and took Clement’s hand.
It turned in her own and clasped hers at once, and Alys had that wonderful feeling of everything within her falling still. Clement’s thumb stroked up over her pulse again and this time it reminded Alys of the day she was mage-tested. Of her measure being taken.
Happiness, larger than any the week had brought thus far—larger than the last five years had managed, perhaps larger than any since the day she was named a mage—unfurled in Alys. Her face was warm and the night was exactly cool enough.
Fifteen minutes of silence, and then the midnight bells for Mathé’s Feast rang out in the North Tower’s chamber, just below their feet.
It was almost too loud to be sound. It was like the roar of water; like magic in Alys’s teeth and bones and skull. No hope that they’d be able to hear any of the other bells, elsewhere in the Blue City. Once she’d ridden the first wave of noise, Alys found the music in it, and began to laugh.
They all scrambled for their lanterns, got them upright, and lit the fuel. The best moment was this: waiting for the lantern to fill and heat and then begin to tug at your grip with the thirst for flight.
The din of the bells died away and Clement’s voice rose to meet it.
The song for Mathé: not the Twilight Chorale, but the Academie’s own song, simple and bright.
All five cohorts would sing it at the graduation concert tomorrow.
Alys and the others joined in on the choruses, falling into the harmony, but by unspoken understanding they left the verses to Clement.
That soaring voice poured out the words like rosewater syrup.
Alys thought again of Balenne’s study group. She wished she’d found these four people earlier, and managed to hold on to them; she wished they’d been brought together by a better kind of luck. What might have happened if they’d been a first-year tutorial group?
In first year Alys had spent all her energy simply getting through without being noticed for the wrong reasons.
Estiene had been an obnoxious snob. Clement had already been overshadowed by Ysabel’s brilliance.
And—well, Alys found it impossible to hold grudges for past behaviour against Jehan and Moyna, now that she knew them and they’d had the chance to know her.
Maybe they’d all had to grow first: grow up and toward one another. Maybe this was the only week they could have found one another, now they were strong enough to hold on.
Let me be brave, Alys wished. Tomorrow and on every day after.
She released her lantern. It held upright, swayed, and drifted up.
Up. Alys watched it for a while and then turned her attention down to the city streets and rooftops, and had a moment of pure personal pride at having reserved the North Tower.
Up here it was as if a lake had unrolled across the city, reflecting the stars in shifting blobs of colour.
And the stars began to rise to meet their fellows: some burning up in premature fire, but most of them rising, as every spark of every human being rose to the great flame in the end.
In the last chorus of the song it was only Alys and Moyna joining in.
After the final line Alys turned away from the building’s edge and looked around.
Moyna had lit the table lanterns again and was sitting on the table itself, looking up at the sea of lights in the sky.
Jehan and Estiene were nowhere to be seen.
“Where—”
“Do you really want to know?” said Moyna.
A beat. Then Clement and Alys burst out laughing, both at the same moment.